Halliburton: From Bush's Favorite to a National Disgrace

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0314-08.htm

Halliburton: From Bush's Favorite to a National Disgrace

It is a symbol of American cronyism, the beneficiary of lucrative Iraq contracts thanks to its relationship with Dick Cheney. Now Halliburton is relocating to Dubai - and US politicians are outraged.
by Andrew Buncombe


The story begins in 1919 with Erle Halliburton sitting up late one night with his wife, Vida, worrying about money. Squeezed together in their one-room home in the Oklahoma dustbowl town of Wilson, the couple were trying to work out how to meet the next payment on Halliburton's fledgling business, the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company.



At about 1am, so the story goes, the pale light from a small lamp reflected off his wife's wedding ring. "I sat there admiring it when the thought came to me," Vida would later tell Jeffrey Rodengen, author of The Legend of Halliburton. "Here is the money we need. At first hubby would not listen to me... but I argued we could get it back. So we went to sleep all thrilled with the new idea of cementing, the new means of getting jobs, and the money."

The rest, as is so often said, is history. Halliburton pawned his wife's wedding ring and set to work servicing drilling operations not just on the Healdton oilfield close to where they lived in Oklahoma, but also in Louisiana and Texas. The following year he changed the company's name to the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company.

Today, almost 90 years after Vida Halliburton's eyes glanced upon the gold band around her finger, the company that took the family name is now a vast multinational with operations in more than 120 countries. It enjoys a remarkably close relationship with the Bush administration whose Vice-President, Dick Cheney, was its CEO between 1995 and 2000, and holds no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars. Last year it made $2.6bn (£1.3bn) in profits from revenues of $22.6bn.

But Halliburton also comes with plenty of controversy and the company has been at the centre of numerous inquiries over alleged accounting malpractice, suspicious payments to officials and overcharging. It has been accused of breaching US sanctions that prohibit companies from operating in places such as Iran and was also blamed for damaging the historic Iraqi site of Babylon, where it helped establish a US base. Currently the company is being investigated by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission over allegations of improper dealings in Kuwait, Nigeria and Iraq. And this week the company fuelled even more controversy when it announced that it was moving its chief executive and its corporate headquarters from Houston, Texas, to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. It has insisted that it would remain incorporated in the US - actually in the state of Delaware - and that its move would not affect its tax position. It also emphasised that it would retain a corporate office in Houston from where most of its executives would continue to operate.

But news of the proposed move, announced at the weekend, has brought an immediate and bitter backlash. A number of senior Democrats have accused the company of nothing less than a blatant attempt to avoid both paying US taxes and the heat of the ongoing federal investigations into its business operations. How could a company that had benefited from so many government contracts, they asked, simply up and leave? There were vows that Congress would launch new investigations.

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