Halliburton’s work in Iran
It’s nice to see some media outlets continue to be amazed that Dick Cheney’s former company does business with Iran.
It’s just another Halliburton oil and gas operation. The company name is emblazoned everywhere: On trucks, equipment, large storage silos and workers’ uniforms.
But this isn’t Texas. It’s Iran. U.S. companies aren’t supposed to do business here.
Yet, in January, Halliburton won a contract to drill at a huge Iranian gas field called Pars, which an Iranian government spokesman said “served the interests” of Iran.
“I am baffled that any American company would want to have employees operating in Iran,” says Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. “I would think they’d be ashamed.”
That assumes Cheney’s company is capable of shame, which, at this point, is a stretch.
But NBC’s point was to report on how Halliburton does this. As the company explains it, its work in Iran is run through “Halliburton Products and Services Limited,” which isn’t the Halliburton we all know and love, but rather, a subsidiary that exists outside the U.S. American companies are prohibited from doing business with Iran, but since this subsidiary is in the carefree Cayman Islands, everything’s kosher. Or so they say.
An ongoing criminal investigation suggests otherwise. In order for Halliburton’s work in Iran to be legal, its subsidiary has to be truly independent of the U.S. operation, and the subsidiary couldn’t have been created simply to circumvent U.S. sanctions. There’s reason to believe Cheney’s former company has trouble with both.
Sources close to the Halliburton investigation tell NBC News that after [Clinton’s 1995 announcement on cutting off all trade and investment with Iran], Halliburton decided that business with Iran, then conducted through at least five companies, would all be done through a subsidiary incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
“It’s gotten around the sanctions and the very spirit and reasons for the sanctions,” says Victor Comras, a former State Department expert on sanctions.
For Halliburton to have done this legally, the foreign subsidiary operating in Iran must be independent of the main operation in Texas. Yet, when an NBC producer approached managers in Iran, he was sent to company officials in Dubai. But they said only Halliburton headquarters in Houston could talk about operations in Iran. Still, Halliburton maintains its Iran subsidiary does make independent business decisions.
It’s worth noting, in case there’s some ambiguity here, that Halliburton’s business deals in Iran date back — you guessed it — to Dick Cheney’s tenure as the company’s CEO.
The United States had concluded that Iraq, Libya, and Iran supported terrorism and had imposed strict sanctions on them. Yet during Cheney’s tenure at Halliburton the company did business in all three countries.
In fact, during the 2000 election, Cheney openly acknowledged that his company did business with Iran through foreign subsidiaries and even lobbied to weaken sanctions on Iran, despite its suspected ties to terrorism.
Most of us have known about this for a while, but it’s still nice to see the media show some interest once in a while.