Halliburton a liability for Bush?!

BusinessWeek is carrying a story detailing how much credibility Halliburton has earned this year with all its displays of integrity and good military-industrial citizenship. Oh, wait:

Questions about Halliburton are piling up rapidly -- and they won't go away soon. The Pentagon Inspector General has asked the Defense Criminal Investigative Service to probe allegations by Representatives Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and John Dingell (D-Mich.) that the outfit inflated the price of fuel it supplied in war-torn Iraq.

Also under scrutiny: Allegations that Halliburton overcharged for meals at a base in Kuwait and might have wildly overstated estimated costs for food services in Iraq. On Feb. 16, Halliburton announced that it was holding on to subcontractors' bills totaling $174.5 million until the amounts it should bill Uncle Sam are resolved. "We did this to take the issue off the table from a political standpoint," says Wendy Hall, Halliburton's director of public relations in an e-mail.

Separately, Halliburton has acknowledged that employees took $6.3 million in kickbacks from a Kuwaiti subcontractor. And the Justice Dept., Securities & Exchange Commission, and French authorities are probing accusations that a Halliburton joint venture paid $180 million in bribes in connection with a Nigerian natural gas plant in the 1990s -- while Cheney was Halliburton's CEO.

AVOIDING COMPETITIVE BIDS. There's plenty more to come. The General Accounting Office is studying Iraq reconstruction contracts and troop-support services -- two reports in which Halliburton should figure prominently. The first is due out in March. Democrats also want a thorough review of the Pentagon's plan to award monopoly, cost-plus contracts for services in Iraq.
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Halliburton is feeling the heat from all this and is defending its Iraq activities, which accounted for 40% of its $5.5 billion in fourth-quarter revenue and 30% of its $146 million income. It has denied wrongdoing in its Iraq contracting and has hired outside lawyers, whom it won't identify, to probe the Nigerian payments.

(via Warincontext)

Posted by HongPong at February 22, 2004 02:47 PM
Listed under Military-Industrial Complex .