France "sleaze inquiry" into Halliburton [View All]

between Putin telling the US he'll put his petro dollars in Euros, and now France putting Halliburton out there for investigation, seems the rest of the western world is trying to tell Bush he can't act like a freakin dictator without getting a little Saddamite smackdown himself. Of course, we all know who will ultimately suffer for Bush's failure as a statesman and a legitimate leader...and that would be us, and other people in other countries who happen to be in the way.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1060842,00.html

French sleaze inquiry targets US oil subsidiary

Jon Henley in Paris
Saturday October 11, 2003
The Guardian

The public prosecutor's office in Paris said yesterday it was opening a formal judicial inquiry into alleged corruption by a French engineering firm and the American oil services giant Halliburton, which was headed until two years ago by Dick Cheney, the vice-president of the United States. The investigation is the first of its kind in France under laws introduced as part of an international convention on cross-border corruption signed in 1997 by some 35 countries, including the US.

The financial crimes squad in Paris believes a French oil and gas engineering firm, Technip, and particularly the Halliburton subsidiary KBR were jointly involved during the 1990s in the payment of up to $200m (£120m) of under-the-counter "commissions" in relation to a huge gas contract in Nigeria. ( )
According to Le Figaro newspaper, French police believe KBR was behind a web of off-shore companies and bank accounts set up to "facilitate" the work of TSKJ, a joint venture between four engineering companies that had won a lucrative contract from international oil companies to build a large liquefied natural gas plant on Bonny Island in the eastern Niger delta.
( )
The French judicial investigation into "corruption of foreign public officials, abuse of funds, complicity and receiving misappropriated monies" targets KBR but will inevitably involve Halliburton, KBR's parent company, which recently won around $1.7bn worth of contracts from the Bush administration to help rebuild Iraq's oil industry.

Some observers, however, said that the potentially embarrassing French investigation into such a well-connected American company could merely be a cynical tit-for-tat response to an equally sensitive investigation in the US into alleged wrongdoing by Crédit Lyonnais during the French bank's buyout of Executive Life Insurance Co, a failed US insurance company.