Dick Cheney and the $5 million man

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040705&s=ireland

The Securities and Exchange Commission has finally opened a formal investigation into allegations that Halliburton (in partnership with French petro-engineering company Technip) funneled $180 million into a slush fund to pay bribes in the construction of a $6 billion Nigerian gas refinery--a scandal that French authorities have been probing for a year (for background, see Doug Ireland, "Will the French Indict Cheney?" December 29, 2003).

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The Journal du Dimanche (JDD, a large Sunday paper) revealed on June 13 that Judge Van Ruymbeke's investigation has uncovered how Albert "Jack" Stanley, the president of huge Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) at the time of the alleged bribery, received so-called "commissions" of 3 percent of the deal from the slush fund. The total amount Stanley received is some $5 million, according to reports in the International Herald Tribune and elsewhere. The Nigerian oil minister at the time, Dan Entete, got $2.5 million, reported the JDD. The slush fund was set up with Halliburton money by a London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler--who worked for Halliburton at the same time he was financial adviser to the notoriously corrupt late Nigerian dictator Gen. Sani Abacha--as a shell-company front called TriStar, which Tesler established in the British tax haven of Gibraltar. Stanley, the 5 Million Dollar Man, is a close friend and associate of Dick Cheney.

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The obvious question is: If the payments to the KBR execs were legitimate, why route them through secret foreign bank accounts? And where did the rest of the $180 million go? To the dictator Abacha, whose money adviser Tesler was, and other Abacha cronies?

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The final contract for construction of the Nigeria refinery, one of the world's largest, was signed in 1999, on Cheney's watch (Cheney was CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000). Bribes of the sort under investigation by the SEC and the French are illegal under statutes of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, of whose international conventions both the United States and France are signatories-members; and under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In disclosing the SEC investigation, Halliburton said it did not believe it had violated the FCPA, while adding, "There can be no assurance that government authorities would not conclude otherwise."

Indeed.
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snake cheney is having trouble getting back under his rock.

Go advocate some more masturbatory activities on the Senate floor, DICK!