NEWS: US Told To Repay Iraq Up To $280 Million Over Halliburton Scandal

In another blow to the already embattled Bush administration, the US has been told it must pay back up to $280 million to Iraq after work paid for with Iraq oil reserves and carried out by Us company Kellog Brown and Root proved to be over priced and of poor standards. KBR is a subsidiary of Halliburton which was once managed by Vice President Dick Cheney. A United Nations auditing board made the order but at this stage it is not clear exactly how much of those funds should be paid back.



Another jobs for the boys gone wrong. It wouldn't be so bad if friends and associates of the administration were given these contracts if they did the job properly and didn't line their already inflated pockets. There was no need to cheat and lie, it was just gluttony to rip these people off. Once again we see the sheer greed of an oil company and the shady dealings of higher ups.

[edit on 5-11-2005 by Mayet]

What i don't get is how the whole of US is responsible for a company. If anything the company should be forced to pay back the money not the tax payers. If the tax payers are paying for oil to be drilled in Iraq then I've yet to see any of the benefits from it. And i agree whole heartedly that this should be paid off. But not by tax payers dollars. But by either the firms dollars or the super rich execs savings. They really don't need that surplus of money.

-Aza

Well I noticed that in the article. I guess because they are ultimately responsible for the contractors. I presume they give the contracts out themselves or award them and with most laws, contract signers are responsible for sub contractors or the people hired to carry out the work. Buck stops here I guess.

I guess the people pay for their government again. Its the people that suffer while the oil companies get richer. and I bet by corporate law if they disolve then they don't have to pay a cent. You do. Remember that next time everyones hard at work and slogging away. This is what you are working so hard for.


[edit on 5-11-2005 by Mayet]

Well ya know from what I understand one of the Iraqi people's biggest gripes about the U.S. invasion, besides bombing the bejesus out of them is that instead of hiring Iraqi's to help rebuild their own country, the majority of the work went to Halliburton and a handful of other firms. This is in a courtry that had massive unemployment before the invasion in large part thanks to the scantions against it. Halliburton has an incredible track record of over charging to a degree that can only be described as absurd...Chambers Johnson's book "The Sorrows of Empire" goes into great detail about this. In it he describes a base in Kosovo that Halliburton built for the U.S. that is so overstocked with furniture that a seperate warehouse had to be built to store the excess and it is so overstaffed that the bathrooms and offices get cleaned 3 and 4 times a day. Personally as a veteran, i find it absurd to think that so much of what we did in the military to keep us occupied and generally out of trouble has been privatized and out-sourced and I think it is totally wrong. Nobody likes KP, painting or scrubing the deck but it had to done and I think its alot better than having the troops either just sitting around waiting for something to happen or constantly training for their specific billet. It created among other things more well rounded troops. As for the U.S. taxpayer paying this money back do you really think with this administration they will make Halliburton pay it back? Hardly...the citizens of this country are not the Bush/Cheney teams constituancy.

the government SHOULD force haliburton to give that money back to them....unfortunately, the government is responsible for giving that money back to whereever it came from....probably the Iraqi people...or Un whatever...

If they dont get on Brown and Root for it, I will be royally peeved! Of course we could always just "put it on our bill" I suspose.....then it will never be paid back probably...

Being a Halliburton stockholder, Michael Moore can't be happy about this.

www.wndbookservice.com...


Some of the shocking hypocrisy Peter Schweizer reveals:

"I don't own a single share of stock," Michael Moore declares. No, his tax returns show he has owned hundreds of thousands -- profiting from some of the very companies (like Halliburton and Boeing) he viciously denounces

Its about darn time someone made these corporate sleezeballs liable for their greed. If I have to pay this back, instead of the company, I'm going to be royally ticked. But of course, you know not one of these guys likes to Actually admit their fault in anything, so........ I guess we all know who will be paying fr this.

"I guess we all know who will be paying fr this."



ummmmm......our great grand children???

The US can and should sue Halliburton. Even Texas sued a company for dereliction like this - within the past couple of years too... Will see if I can find it - think it had to do with gouging for vaccines last year.

No way that'll happen, have you forgotten about Emperor Cheney's ties with them?

There is no way Darth Bush would let a law suit be brought against them.

Actually I think cheney- bush would support the suing of halliburton. They would want to keep their hands out of that mess and the only way to save face from their strong ties is to let them sue. but then again it looks bad on them for supporting them earlier and then quickly turning around and letting them take the fall. But then thats most politics.

-Aza

Cheney will never allow to have halliburton under investigation and sue because that will add more dirt to his already dirty office he does have very strong links with them.

It will never happen.

Here's one good place for the Rico Act to be used........and the seized assets of Halliburton and any of their cohorts, used to pay any thing owed. The people of the US should not have to bail these guys out!!!!

honestly all we see in this administration is scandal after scandal usually involving their croneyism. The board of Halliburton should be shot for their crimes

And lest we forget...

this exact same company has the contracts to cleanup and rebuild after disaster damage in the USA, as in New Orleans.

Watergate pales into insignificance with all the scandals of this administration as already said but everyone seems quite content to let this happen.

If this thread gets off of the first page without even one person suggesting that maybe Iraq "owed" us the oil and that we shouldn't repay, that in and of itself will be worthy of its own ATSNN Story. It's been no secret to me for almost a year that Bush is not so much a lame duck as a dead one, but has anyone noticed a conspicuous lack of wagons being circled around Bush these days?
I mean, we all know that 45-52% of this country is going to vote Republican in 2008, depending on how the party deals with Bush and who they run next, but even they have really tempered their support for this administration.

As for the issue itself: I am conflicted about it, as I believe many conservatives (not necessarily republicans) will be. I don't find it conscionable to deny not only that they money should be returned but that they perps should be punished. It's just that it's hard to stomach being ordered to correct an act of corruption from a body as corrupt as the United Nations.
I think some of you can probably identify with what I'm saying- have you ever known something was right and wanted to do it, but then some hypocrite TELLS you to do it, just to spite you, and you suddenly wish that there was some way to do the right thing without doing what the hypocrite "ordered" you to do, (not only because he is a hypocrite but also because you do not recognize his authority to give such an order)?

If I were calling the shots, people would go to jail over this, the money would be repaid, then I'd pressure Iraq to issue indictments against all UN officials and corporate decision makers, Americans and others, who participated in the oil for food scandal, preferably at a time at least some of the officials in question were on US or Iraqi soil in a non-diplomatic capacity, so that they could be arrested and extradited to Iraq for trial.

I'm big on fairness. It's fair for the Iraqis to expect justice. It's not fair for the UN to do something like this out of spite when they've been raping Iraq and others just as badly.

www.abc.net.au...
The United States should reimburse Iraq for $US208 million in apparent overcharges paid to a Halliburton subsidiary, an UN watchdog agency has said.
The International Advisory and Monitoring Board for the Development of Iraq conducted a special audit on Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) unit for the procurement and distribution of fuel products and the restoration of Iraq's oil infrastructure.
The monitoring board cited charges of $US208 million, costs that earlier had been questioned by US military auditors.
In a statement made public on its website on Saturday, the board said it "recommends that amounts disbursed to contractors that cannot be supported as fair be reimbursed expeditiously".
Halliburton spokeswoman Cathy Mann said the US auditors questioned the quality of the supporting documents for the costs, not the costs themselves.
"Therefore, it would be completely wrong to say or imply that any of these costs that were incurred at the client's direction for its benefit are 'overcharges'," Ms Mann said.
The monitoring board can make recommendations but not decisions on whether reimbursements are made.
Iraq's oil account, called the Development Fund for Iraq, was set up by the UN Security Council, along with the monitoring board, to watch over the stewardship of Iraq's natural resources during the US administration of Iraq.

The hilarity of it all is the U.N. demanding the U.S. pay for anything!

I have noticed tha tthe baord has paid no attention to the finding against the U.N.and just how dreadfully criminal it is.

I forgot. If it is a collection of continental European nations mixed in with despotic third world nations, everything is fair and legal!

Pfft.

Iraq should reimburse us for delivering their children from Hussein, but that is quite another story.

Better yet, we should sue our government for placing our troops in harm's way to do for someone else what they didn't want to do for themselves.

I guess thats correct but then if you throw three corrupt entities into the mix, Halliburton, The Bush Administration and the UN, this is the result. An expensive shambles that the ultimate consumer, the American people, end up paying for out of their own pockets.

I guess also you might as well add the Iraq government to the corruption list.





*and don't get me wrong, I am not "Bush Bashing" in that way. I think it would have turned out the same even if Kerry was in charge, only the name of the company involved may have been different.

Corruption starts small at the bottom but look what it blows out to at the top.

[edit on 6-11-2005 by Mayet]