AWB revisited

Well, it's interesting that the class action of AWB shareholders has finally got to court [see my post from Sept 29 2006], and what is the first revelation?

According to The Australian on Thursday 11th February, AWB has admitted for the first time it knew it was paying 'transport fees' that would end up with Saddam Hussein's regime.... according to court documents released yesterday, AWB says it knew the payments being made to the Jordanian trucking company, Alia, were then being forwarded to an Iraqi company, the Iraqi State Company for Water Transport.

In a further stunning revelation [according to The Australian 12th Feb] "AWB executives were untroubled by the idea they were funnelling money to Saddam Hussein's regime, and the company showed a "lack of internal reflection and soul-searching" about its business dealings with the Iraqi government"

On the second day of his opening address, on behalf of a shareholder class action against AWB, John Sheahan SC told the Federal Court in Sydney yesterday it was remarkable how executives from the Australian company would "blandly" discuss deliberately disguising payments to Jordanian trucking company Alia as business transactions.

Not only does this clearly imply deceptive conduct and unconscionable behaviour on behalf of the AWB, but it also implies complete incompetence or deception on a massive scale by the then Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, who of course denied any knowledge of this at the time. What an appalling legacy for both him and the Howard Government!

A

Macs and more...

One thing that never fails to amaze me is the almost religious fervour with which mac aficionados seem to greet the latest product announcement from Apple's Steve Jobs [in this case, the I-Pad].

You'd think that every new product they release is going to save the world, rather than make the 'big A' a tidy profit.

Interestingly, even before Apple began to release their range of super consumer-oriented products [I-Phone, I-Pod etc], Mac computer followers were always devotional in the way they greeted any new mac computer release... and it was always taken for granted that Mac software was way superior to that of Microsoft.

Although not swept away by this mystical belief, it suited me [because I was going to use them for design purposes] to get a couple of macs to complement my PC in the office. And from a software perspective, the mac had a couple of nice touches, but there was simply nothing miraculous about the mac's software - in fact I found each system [Mac OS and Windows OS] to have advantages and disadvantages.

One thing that soon bothered me with Mac [unlike Windows] is that when Apple produced a revised operating system [which they tend to do every couple of years] they force you to buy that new version, because you suddenly find that most of your old software no longer works - unlike Windows.

And yet, it's still taken almost as a given with these Mac purists that Apple can do no wrong. You almost have to wonder if these people have something missing in their lives, that they have to worship this company as the harbinger of all that is good in this world!