{"id":2984,"date":"2004-11-09T12:33:28","date_gmt":"2004-11-09T17:33:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2984.html"},"modified":"2004-11-09T12:33:28","modified_gmt":"2004-11-09T17:33:28","slug":"another-day-another-halliburton-scandal-worsens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/another-day-another-halliburton-scandal-worsens\/","title":{"rendered":"Another day, another Halliburton scandal worsens"},"content":{"rendered":"

I suppose it’s possible for things to get worse for Halliburton, but I’m not sure how.<\/p>\n

Two weeks ago, the company became the subject of a criminal investigation<\/a>, which came a few months after a Securities and Exchange Commission probe<\/a>, which came a couple of months after a federal grand jury issued a subpoena<\/a> to Halliburton seeking information about its Cayman Islands unit’s work in Iran, where it is illegal for U.S. companies to operate. Now a federal bribery investigation<\/a> is heating up in a major way.<\/p>\n

Various investigations into an alleged $180 million bribery scandal in Nigeria involving a Halliburton Co. subsidiary and other companies have indicated that payments may have been made to Nigerian officials, the company said in a regulatory filing. <\/p>\n

“We understand from the ongoing governmental and other investigations that payments may have been made to Nigerian officials,” the Houston-based oil services conglomerate said in a quarterly filing Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The same filing indicated that A. Jack Stanley, a former senior executive who worked alongside Dick Cheney, may have been directly involved<\/a> with the bribes.<\/p>\n

This story started making waves way back in January, when the Dallas Morning News ran a detailed story<\/a> on its front page explaining Halliburton’s alleged role in a scandal in which the company worked with French business partners to offer $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials in order to win a lucrative construction contract in the 1990s. Cheney was, of course, Halliburton’s CEO at the time.<\/p>\n

And now the company is effectively admitting that bribes were, in fact, made. This is going to get worse before it gets better.
\n
\nI should add that this also has “international incident” written all over it. As the original Dallas Morning News article explained, this controversy is being pursued under a treaty signed by the U.S. and more than 30 countries “outlawing bribery of foreign public officials. It makes the payment of such bribes a criminal offense.”<\/p>\n

And just to make Cheney twitch a little, it’s also interesting that the scandal unfolded as part of an investigation lauched by (cue scary music) … the French<\/i>. Indeed, The Nation reported<\/a> nearly a year ago that an “indictment” against Cheney from French officials is not outside the realm of possibility.<\/p>\n

One of France’s best-known investigating magistrates, Judge Renaud van Ruymbeke…has been conducting a probe of the Nigeria deal since October. And, three days before Christmas, the Paris daily Le Figaro front-paged the news that Judge van Ruymbeke had notified the Justice Ministry that Cheney might be among those eventually indicted as a result of his investigation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obviously, that was nearly a year ago and nothing’s happened. Still, this is a scandal that’s heating up, not cooling down. Something to keep an eye on.<\/p>\n

Post Script<\/i>: Just because I care about such things, I’d like to note that the Halliburton filing came on Friday afternoon and went completely unnoted in the media over the weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I suppose it’s possible for things to get worse for Halliburton, but I’m not sure how. Two weeks ago, the company became the subject of a criminal investigation, which came a few months after a Securities and Exchange Commission probe, which came a couple of months after a federal grand jury issued a subpoena to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}