While AWB made its lucrative wheat sales with Iraq, Saddam Hussein's notoriously brutal and cruel regime was an international pariah.
By the time the secrets of AWB's deals came to light, the Australian wheat exporter had itself turned into something of a pariah.
The former Australian Wheat Board lost its lucrative monopoly over bulk wheat exports, held since 1939, when the government legislated in 2008 to abolish the single wheat trading desk.
But for AWB's actions in Iraq, it's unlikely the Australian government would have taken that action, the corporate regulator maintains.
"AWB had turned itself into such a pariah both internationally and nationally that it was necessary that that be done," Australian Securities and Investments Commission counsel Norman O'Bryan SC said.
Eight years after ASIC started its AWB civil action, the company's former chairman Trevor James Flugge and former group general manager trading Peter Anthony Geary are facing a 10-week trial for allegedly breaching their duties as officers.
Iraq was a crucial market for AWB, making up a substantial part of its overall annual wheat sales as well as being highly profitable, the Victorian Supreme Court heard.
The AWB single desk - shorthand for the legislated position for AWB to be the sole exporter of bulk shipments of Australian wheat - facilitated the export of up to 17 million tonnes of wheat worth up to $5 billion a year.
But, as an appeal judge noted in 2013, even at best its relationship with one of its biggest customers was somewhat fraught.
Iraq was regarded as a high risk, high return market, featuring as the top destination for AWB's wheat by volume with more than half a billion dollars in value.
The United Nations effectively took control of all Iraq's international trade after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990, as the international community sought to limit and prevent Hussein's "monstrous activities".
"The UN sought to tighten its grip around Saddam Hussein by denying to him the use of international currency which they knew that he would use to buy things like weaponry to threaten and attack his neighbours," Mr O'Bryan said.
When the Iraqi Grain Board started charging fees in 1999 for purported inland transportation and after-sales service, AWB "simply closed its eyes and paid", Mr O'Bryan said.
Mr Flugge, Mr O'Bryan said, was a somewhat unusual chairman in that he was very hands on and very much an executive chairman in dealing with certain aspects of AWB's business.
He regularly personally travelled not only to Iraq but around the world doing business on AWB's behalf and negotiating contracts.
"Iraq seemed to be a particular place of interest to him. He visited quite regularly. He knew important people there and he maintained contact with them."
Mr Flugge maintains he has done nothing wrong.
After the invasion of Kuwait, Iraq was well and truly on the outer internationally, a position that continued for many years.
"Iraq was at this time somewhat of an international pariah following the invasion of Kuwait in 1990," Mr O'Bryan said.
"The Saddam Hussein regime was notoriously brutal and cruel.
"The Iraq people suffered a great deal, particularly minority or other interests in Iraq."
AWB successfully beat the international competition to sell wheat to Iraq under the UN's oil-for-food program, set up in 1996.
But, as the Cole royal commission found in 2006, AWB knowingly made secret payments to the Hussein regime.
After coalition forces - including Australia - invaded Iraq in 2003, it didn't take long for them to work out wheat contracts had been improperly inflated with so-called inland transportation and after-sales service fees.
That spelt the end for the AWB and its monopoly.
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