Vice President Dick Cheney faces serious charges in French courts for possible bribery, money-laundering, and misuse of corporate assets during his employment as the CEO of Halliburton.
Investigations are being launched in France to discover possible corruption in a large natural gas liquification project in Nigeria – run by Halliburton and a prominent French engineering company, Technip.
In May, legal staff for Halliburton admitted that under the leadership of Dick Cheney, approximately $2.4 million was paid to Nigerian officials to gain favorable tax treatment for their endeavors in the country.
Transparency International, an independent anti-corruption watchdog group, reports that Nigeria is the world’s second most corrupt country, second only to Bangladesh.
It has been reported in the Sydney Australia Morning Herald that French prosecutors are targeting Cheney specifically in the matter of “alleged complicity in the use of corporate assets.”
The Paris daily paper, Le Figaro, has reported that a Halliburton lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler, based in London, handled up to $180 million in funds from Halliburton and Technip that were called “retro-commissions.” It is believed that some was funneled to Nigerian officials as bribes.
Tesler was paid the money through a front-company he established, TriStar, which was based in Gibraltar as a commercial consultant. TriStar money came from a consortium of Halliburton and Technip that was set up for the Nigeria contract registered in Madeira, a tax-exempt island off the coast of Portugal.
The French news agency, Agence France-Presse, reported that a former Technip official testified that the Madeira-based syndicate was, in fact, a “slush fund” controlled by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root and Technip.
Authority for this multinational investigation, conducted largely by Investigating Magistrate Renaud van Ruymbeke, comes from a law that France passed in 2000 against bribing foreign officials.
It does not seem as though Judge van Ruymbeke is targeting Cheney specifically as a form of revenge for the Bush administrations’ exclusion of France from reconstruction contracts in Iraq, as the judge is extremely politically independent.
Journal Du Dimanche, a large Sunday paper in France stated that “it is probable that some of the ‘retrocommissions’ found their way back to the United States.” There is a question of whether or not these funds were channeled to Halliburton officials or United States Republican party officials.
Despite the stir the charges are creating in Europe and other parts of the globe, few news organizations have delved seriously into this potential scandal in the United States. It is yet to be determined whether or not American news media will disclose the allegations before the November elections.