Aiken, who joined BHPB in 1997, and corporate development president Tom Harley were the first of five current and former BHPB employees to be questioned over their dealings with Iraq.

Aiken told the inquiry he was not involved in negotiations for Iraq to repay the $A10 million for the shipment and accrued interest.

The inquiry has heard Australian monopoly wheat exporter, AWB Ltd, inflated wheat contracts to recover $8 million in debt owed to Tigris Petroleum, BHPB’s Iraq joint venture partner in the country.

Tigris was set up in 2000 by former BHPB employee Norman Davidson Kelly.

“I never discussed with Davidson Kelly any mechanism to enable repayment or any repayment process. I never considered any mechanism,” Aiken said in his statement to the commission.

Aiken further added that he did not believe he gave Tigris the authority to try and recover the debt.

“I don’t believe we gave Tigris Petroleum that authority,” he said. “I didn’t really focus on this debt, I was told it was written off. It was before my time.”

Meanwhile, Harley and BHPB lawyer Jim Lyons told the inquiry that they believed the 20,000 tonne wheat shipment in January 1996 was a gift that would help the company gain access to Iraq’s oil and gas fields once UN sanctions were lifted.

Commissioner Terence Cole, who is leading the inquiry, has previously branded the deal a “soft bribe”.

Lyons also revealed BHPB wanted to keep secret the fact it paid for the wheat shipment because it feared a public backlash about the company being involved with Saddam Hussein’s government.

Documentation from around the time of the shipment shows BHPB had planned to collect the debt by 2000 and it shows Iraq agreeing to pay in crude oil when sanctions were lifted.

But Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs told BHPB twice that the shipment was humanitarian and the debt could not be collected.

At the time, the UN had sanctions in place against Iraq, banning companies from receiving payments from Saddam’s government.