Report Shows Koch Brothers Made Sales to Iran,Bribed Officials,and Falsified Data
As big funders of the Tea Party, billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have underwritten a populist movement against oversized government and ‘excessive’ regulation.
Now a new report suggests that in their own corporation, they’ve taken a different approach to government regulation: They’ve simply ignored it.
An extensive investigation in Bloomberg Markets magazine finds that Koch Industries has made multiple ‘improper payments’ (read: bribes) to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East; rigged prices with competitors; and used foreign subsidiaries to sell equipment to Iran. (Read the full story here.)
According to the Bloomberg report, the company had a widespread culture of cheating and deception.
Sally Barnes-Soliz, who’s now an investigator for the State Department of Labor and Industries in Washington, says that when she worked for Koch, her bosses and a company lawyer at the Koch refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, asked her to falsify data for a report to the state on uncontrolled emissions of benzene, a known cause of cancer. Barnes-Soliz, who testified to a federal grand jury, says she refused to alter the numbers.
“They didn’t know what to do with me,” she says. “They were really kind of baffled that I had ethics.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-46840786/report-koch-brothers-made-sales-to-iran/
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