Let us pause once more to remember Halliburton, the company that used to run ads saying they got work “because of what we know, not who we know,” the company that won a sole-source contract from the Pentagon in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and won an umbrella military service contract, called LOGCAP, that was first proposed back when Dick Cheney, the company’s future CEO, served as the Secretary of Defense.
Well, it turns out the company actually did get work because of who they knew. And they did not make their friends the old fashioned way. Through its former subsidiary, KBR, which holds the big logistical contract with the U.S. military, the company had consultants packing bags and cars with thousands of hundred dollar bills to bribe Nigerian officials to win a multi-billion dollar contract. “This bribery scheme involved both senior foreign government officials and KBR corporate executives who took actions to insulate themselves from the reach of U.S. law,” says Rita M. Galvin, acting assistant attorney general.
At the center of the plot is a former colleague of Cheney’s, whom Cheney promoted at the company, Albert “Jack” Stanley, a past chairman of KBR who pleaded guilty last year to conspiring to violate federal anti-bribery laws. As the Wall Street Journal reported:
According to the plea, government prosecutors said bribes began in 1995, while Mr. Stanley worked for M.W. Kellogg, then part of a company called Dresser Industries Inc. Halliburton acquired Dresser in 1998 and merged M.W. Kellogg into an engineering and construction unit of Halliburton called Kellogg Brown & Root, or KBR.
Several of the bribes Mr. Stanley has said were paid occurred after that acquisition, during the time when Vice President Dick Cheney led Halliburton, and they continued after Mr. Cheney left. Though there was no evidence Mr. Cheney knew of the bribes, the future vice president promoted Mr. Stanley to run KBR in 1998. Mr. Stanley’s guilty plea said the bribes continued until 2004, the year Halliburton fired him. Mr. Cheney’s tenure as Halliburton chief executive ended in 2000.
At the time of Stanley’s guilty plea, Cheney’s office declined to comment on “pending litigation.” Now that the litigation is over–Halliburton and KBR have agreed to pay $579 million in fines–I wonder what the former vice president will say now.