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Last Updated: Sep 7, 2008 - 8:02:26 AM |
Albert Jack Stanley pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire and
mail fraud and conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
He was promoted by Cheney in 1998 to head Kellogg, Brown & Root,
Halliburton’s engineering and construction subsidiary. Stanley faces
seven years in prison and nearly $11 million in restitution payments.
KBR, which also has handled lucrative U.S. government support contracts
for U.S. troops in Iraq and elsewhere, was spun off from Halliburton
last year into a separate company. In 2002, Halliburton was on the
brink of bankruptcy related to a massive financial settlement it paid
out to settle asbestos litigation. But the company bounced back after
its KBR subsidiary was awarded a multibillion dollar no-bid contract to
rebuild oil wells in Iraq.
According to the plea, Stanley started paying bribes began in 1995, the
year Cheney was named chief executive of the corporation, and ended
when Stanley was fired in 2004.
As part of the plea deal, Stanley will cooperate with the federal
government’s continuing investigation into the matter, now entering its
fifth year, which may result in criminal charges against other KBR
executives.
There is no evidence that Cheney was aware that the bribes took place
during his five years he spent as Halliburton’s CEO.
Halliburton and KBR are still the subject of a Securities and Exchange
Investigation related to the bribes and the governments of Switzerland
and the United Kingdom are also investigating the matter.
Halliburton disclosed in a July 25 SEC filing that it had been engaged
in talks with federal prosecutors and securities regulators to settle
the probe .
"From time to time, we and KBR have engaged in discussions with the SEC
and the DOJ regarding a settlement of these matters," Halliburton
disclosed in a July 25 SEC filing.
Halliburton disclosed in a footnote in its quarterly filing with the
SEC in May that the Justice Department "has evidence of payments to
Nigerian officials by another agent in connection with a separate
KBR-managed project in Nigeria called the Shell EA project."
The footnote’s reference to Shell was the first time the petroleum
giant was linked to the bribery suspicions.
Last year, oil field services company Baker Hughes Inc. paid $44.1
million and agreed to hire an outside monitor to oversee its compliance
activities to settle claims related to a federal bribery probe of its
operations in Nigeria, Angola and Kazakhstan.
In May, Halliburton warned investors that federal prosecutors have
obtained evidence that Halliburton officials bribed Nigerian officials
to secure the Bonny Island natural gas liquefaction plant contract in
violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The bribes
allegedly went to the notoriously corrupt Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha
and some of his subordinates.
In its quarterly filing last October, Halliburton said it was
subpoenaed by the Justice Department and SEC over the use – by a
KBR-led consortium known as TSKJ – “of an immigration services
provider, apparently managed by a Nigerian immigration official, to
which approximately $1.8 million in payments in excess of costs of
visas were allegedly made between approximately 1997 and the
termination of the provider in December 2004 and our 2007 reporting of
this matter to the government.”
Halliburton also noted that federal investigators had “expressed
concern regarding the level of our cooperation,” wording that suggests
suspicion of a cover-up or at least foot-dragging.
Halliburton’s April 25 filing marked the first time that specific
evidence was cited to support claims that Halliburton bribed Nigerian
officials in violation of the U.S. Corrupt Foreign Practices Act while
Cheney was the company’s chief executive officer.
The SEC, which regulates companies that sell stock on public markets as
Halliburton does, also has been investigating the case. Halliburton
said it had agreed to extend the statute of limitations related to the
investigation.
According to previous published accounts of the bribery scandal, the
cash allegedly was laundered through UK lawyer Jeffrey Tesler, who
served as a consultant to KBR after it was formed in a 1998 merger that
Cheney engineered between Halliburton and Dresser Industries.
French Disclosures
The bribery investigation was launched in 2003 when Georges Krammer, a
former executive French company Technip, a member of the consortium for
the Bonny Island project, informed French magistrate Renaud Van
Ruymbeke that the contracts his group obtained came as a result of
payments Tesler made to Nigerian officials from a slush fund the lawyer
allegedly managed.
For more than a year, the magistrate poured over evidence to determine
whether Cheney may have been responsible under French law for at least
one of four bribery payments to the Nigerian officials.
Under French law, “the head of a company can be charged with ‘misuse of
corporate assets’ for bribes paid by any employee – even if the
executive didn’t know about the improper payments.” Authorities in the
UK and Switzerland also have been investigating the matter.
Legal observers say it is highly unlikely that the U.S. Justice
Department will further implicate Cheney in the scandal even if alleged
bribery did take place on his watch. To date, there has been no direct
evidence indicating that Cheney played a direct role in the bribes.
However, during Cheney’s tenure, Halliburton did expand operations in
Nigeria despite human rights abuses by Gen. Abacha’s regime and
environmental damage to the Niger Delta caused by international oil
companies, Shell and Chevron, both of which signed contracts with
Halliburton subsidiaries.
In April 2000, Brown & Root Energy Services, a business unit of
Halliburton, was selected by Shell Petroleum Development Co. of Nigeria
to work on the development of an offshore oil and gas facility, the
first of its kind for Shell.
The deal, valued at $300 million, has been questioned by activists who
have tried to hold Shell accountable for the pollution and the human
rights abuses that have harmed Nigerian indigenous groups in a part of
the Niger Delta known as Ogoniland.
In its four-plus decades of oil exploration in Nigeria, Shell has been
responsible for repeated environmental calamities, involving oil
spills, noxious gas flares, cleared forests, despoiled farmland and
pipeline blowouts.
Gen. Abacha’s appreciation for the money that Shell’s operations put
into his coffers made him an eager ally when the oil industry faced
popular protests, which were crushed by the dictator’s army and
security forces.
In 1995, the year Cheney joined Halliburton, renowned writer and
environmental advocate Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his colleagues were
hanged by the Abacha government for their efforts to prevent Shell from
continuing to poison the environment of the Niger Delta.
It is estimated that more than 2,000 people have been murdered for
their involvement in protests against Shell’s activities in the Delta.
Most of those murdered were Ogoni who had rallied behind Saro-Wiwa in
the early 1990s.
In 1998, Gen. Abacha died of an apparent heart attack
Source:Ocnus.net 2008
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