Yet
another sordid chapter in the murky annals of
Halliburton might well lead to the indictment
of Dick Cheney by a French court on charges
of bribery, money-laundering and misuse of corporate
assets.
At
the heart of the matter is a $6 billion gas
liquification factory built in Nigeria on behalf
of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton--the company
Cheney headed before becoming Vice President--in
partnership with a large French petroengineering
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.
One
of France's best-known investigating magistrates,
Judge Renaud van Ruymbeke--who came to fame
by unearthing major French campaign finance
scandals in the 1990s that led to a raft of
indictments--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.
According
to accounts in the French press, Judge van Ruymbeke
believes that some or all of $180 million in
so-called secret "retrocommissions" paid by
Halliburton and Technip were, in fact, bribes
given to Nigerian officials and others to grease
the wheels for the refinery's construction.
These reports say van Ruymbeke has fingered
as the bagman in the operation a 55-year-old
London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler, who has worked
for Halliburton for some thirty years. It was
Tesler who was paid the $180 million as a "commercial
consultant" through a Gibraltar-based front
company he set up called TriStar. TriStar, in
turn, got the money from a consortium set up
for the Nigeria deal by Halliburton and Technip
and registered in Madeira, the Portuguese offshore
island where taxes don't apply. According to
Agence France-Presse, a former top Technip official,
Georges Krammer, has testified that the Madeira-based
consortium was a "slush fund" controlled by
Halliburton--through its subsidiary Kellogg
Brown & Root--and Technip. Krammer, who is cooperating
with the investigation, also swore that Tesler
was imposed as the intermediary by Halliburton
over the objections of Technip.
Tesler
is a curious fellow: A veteran operator in Nigeria,
he was the financial adviser to the late dictator
Gen. Sani Abacha and controlled his personal
fortune, while at the same time working for
Halliburton. Abacha's former Oil Minister, Dan
Etete--who is suspected of having used some
of the alleged bribe money to buy himself fancy
apartments in Paris and a chateau in Normandy--was
deposed by Judge van Ruymbeke in December. According
to the Journal du Dimanche (a large Sunday paper),
Etete's testimony seemed to confirm the judge's
suspicions that Tesler laundered the $180 million
through offshore and other accounts, and that
part of the money wound up in dictator Abacha's
coffers. Tesler's bank accounts in Monaco, Switzerland
and elsewhere have been subpoenaed in an effort
to find out where the money went.
Judge
van Ruymbeke's authority for his transnational
investigation comes from a law France passed
in 2000 against "bribing foreign officials,"
following its ratification of a convention adopted
by the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development prohibiting bribe-giving in
the course of commercial transactions. The notion
that the judge's targeting of Cheney might be
in part retaliatory for the Bush Administration's
exclusion of France from Iraq reconstruction
contracts is unlikely: Van Ruymbeke is notoriously
independent, and his previous investigations
have been aimed at politicians and parties of
both right and left. He's also no stranger to
the unsavory world of oil-and-gas politics,
having previously investigated bribe-giving
by the French petrogiant Elf--indeed, it was
in the course of his Elf investigation that
van Ruymbeke stumbled upon the Nigerian deal.
The
suspected bribe money was mostly ladled out
between 1995 and 2000, when Cheney was Halliburton's
CEO. The Journal du Dimanche reported on December
21 that "it is probable that some of the 'retrocommissions'
found their way back to the United States" and
asked, did this money go "to Halliburton's officials?
To officials of the Republican Party?" These
questions have so far gone unasked by America's
media, which have completely ignored the explosive
Le Figaro headline revealing the targeting of
Cheney. It will be interesting to see if the
US press looks seriously into this ticking time-bomb
of a scandal before the November elections.
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