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more on this
www.warprofiteers.com/article.php?id=11939
snip
The 519 subcontracts dumped in deYoung's lap added up to $l.8 billion. La Nouvelle's contracts accounted for $400 million of that and dealt with everything from construction equipment to transportation to dining facilities. But what was La Nouvelle?
Its two principal managers, Ali Hijazi and Ahmed Al Homoud, describe it as a Kuwaiti-registered company, started in 1997, that provided supplies to U.S. armed forces and oil-field operations. But to deYoung it seemed defined much more by its third focus, interior design, and by Al Homoud's American-born wife, Wendy Stafford, who often represented it.
La Nouvelle had no trucks of its own, or warehouses, or dining facilities. It merely hired local subcontractors and took a middleman fee. But it did know how to do that, and goods did get delivered—at prices that seemed to yield very healthy profits. DeYoung recalls Stafford in elegant, tight clothes, with expensively teased hair and "lots of jewelry—diamonds, diamonds, diamonds."
One of the La Nouvelle contracts that caught deYoung's eye was for laundry—laundry, that is, for all contractors and military at a nearby base. The bill, she says, "went from $62,000 a month to $l.2 million a month—over about 60 days!" Given the number of people whose laundry was being done, deYoung figured that on average a 15-pound bag was costing $108. At the same time, KBR was paying $28 a bag under a different contract at another site—to La Nouvelle!
"When they chose to cut a clean contract, they were quite capable of doing that," deYoung says. "And when they chose to make a contract messy, they could do that too." (La Nouvelle spokeswoman Jennifer Thomas replies that deYoung's $108 estimate is incorrect, and that La Nouvelle is unaware of the other contract to which deYoung refers.)
On March 16, 2004, deYoung met La Nouvelle's troika of top personnel for the first time—Stafford, Al Homoud, and Hijazi—and asked the group for documentation on the expensive laundry contract. Stafford and the others said there wasn't any. (In retrospect, La Nouvelle says, they don't know what documentation deYoung was referring to, nor does their subcontractor.) DeYoung says she'd already found the paperwork herself, and it had taken her about a minute on a calculator to conclude that KBR and La Nouvelle together were overcharging on the laundry by about $1 million a month. By her estimate, the monthly bill should have been $200,000, not $l.2 million. When deYoung showed her documents to Hijazi, he e-mailed a powerful ally for help: a KBR vice president who wasn't in procurement, deYoung says, and should have had no say over the contract. But the V.P. was a top KBR manager in Kuwait. "Within 24 hours, I was told I was off the La Nouvelle account."
Last June, Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall declared to the Houston Chronicle that the company's own auditing system had raised concerns about La Nouvelle, and that La Nouvelle as a result had been "removed from consideration for future work." La Nouvelle, on the other hand, claimed it was owed hundreds of millions of dollars by KBR. On October 15, 2004, La Nouvelle filed suit in a Virginia federal court, seeking at least $224 million in compensation and other damages.
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