"Tracing the Halliburton money trail to Nigeria"

The Cheney Connection

by Doug Ireland, www.laweekly.com

Was Halliburton, the oil conglomerate once headed by Dick Cheney, involved in a massive $180 million bribery scheme in Nigeria on Cheney’s watch? Hopes that the veil may finally be lifted on yet another odoriferous Halliburton scandal were raised last Friday, when it was announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission has finally opened a formal investigation into the alleged bribery - which French authorities have been probing for a year. In Paris, official documents revealing that Cheney might be among those indicted on corruption charges as a result of the French investigation made front-page news there last Christmas - but not here.

The newly launched SEC probe was undoubtedly sparked by the latest revelations in the French investigation. A Halliburton London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler - identified by the French investigating magistrate conducting the international bribery probe as the bagman who controlled the secret $180 million "slush fund" set up (according to French press reports) by a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) - admitted in mid-May, under oath, making two payments from the slush fund totaling nearly $1 million to two top KBR executives.

At the heart of the complicated scandal is a $6 billion gas-liquefaction factory - one of the largest in the world - built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton in partnership with a large French petro-engineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh. The French investigation is the first under a new statute, passed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and ratified by France in 2000, making bribe giving in the course of business transactions a crime. The U.S. is one of the 30-country member signatories to the OECD conventions, and U.S. law has banned such payments for 25 years.
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