http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/chen-j28.shtml
Will Vice President Cheney be indicted-and will the US media report it?
By Patrick Martin
28 January 2004
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A French investigation into $180 million in bribes paid by oil companies to
government officials in Nigeria threatens to implicate US Vice President
Richard Cheney, according to reports in the French and British press. The
conservative French daily newspaper Le Figaro wrote last month that "the
Paris court contemplates an eventual indictment of the present United States
' vice president, Richard Cheney, in his capacity as former CEO of
Halliburton."
The American media, however, has been all but silent on the subject. The
first reference to appear in a major US daily occupied all of nine brief
paragraphs in the Washington Post January 21. The newspaper buried on page
A23 a report that the second highest official in the US government was under
investigation for authorizing bribes. The Post article made no mention of
any possible indictment of Cheney, only noting that the bribes were
allegedly paid while he was Halliburton's chief executive, from 1995 to
2000.
The case arises from the awarding of a multi-billion-dollar contract to
build a new natural gas production facility on Bonny Island in the eastern
part of the Niger River delta. The contract was won by a four-nation
consortium headed by Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), Halliburton's construction
arm. Its partners were Technip of France, the Italian firm Snamprogetti, and
JGC of Japan.
The four construction firms were to build a huge gas liquefaction factory,
one of the largest in the world, and other related facilities, for a
consortium of four oil companies: the Nigerian National Oil Company, which
owns 49 percent of the venture; Shell, which owns 25.6 percent;
Total-Fina-Elf of France; which owns 15 percent; and Agip International of
Italy, which owns 10.4 percent. The $6 billion project was run by a joint
venture given the title TSKJ, from the initials of the four construction
companies.
French authorities began a bribery investigation in October, 2002, probing
reports that $180 million (3 percent of the value of the contract) had been
paid from TSKJ between 1995 and 2001
to a shell company in the Madeira Islands. This money was then funneled
through a series of bank accounts in Gibraltar, Switzerland and Monaco, all
controlled by a London lawyer who had performed no work for the project.
Enough evidence was developed to warrant assigning the case to a special
anti-corruption investigating judge, Renaud Van Ruymbeke, in June 2003. He
opened a formal criminal probe in October, 2003.
The circumstances of the payments suggest that they were originally directed
to the late Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, who died suddenly in 1998. (The
funds were abruptly shifted from Switzerland to Monaco after a Swiss
judicial proceeding began into Abacha's assets there.) It is not clear who
actually controls the funds now. Such payments are illegal under a 1997
convention barring "bribery of foreign public officials in commercial
negotiations," adopted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), the 35-nation club of wealthy countries to which the
United States belongs.
According to the account in Le Figaro, Kellogg, Brown & Root could be
charged with paying bribes, but Cheney would not, because the kickbacks may
not have been received until after he left Halliburton in 2000. Because the
complex web of financial intermediaries was set up beginning in 1995,
however, Judge Van Ruymbeke is contemplating bringing charges of misuse of
funds, a separate offense under French law.
While the bribery probe is the first of its kind in France under the
convention on cross-border corruption, it is the outcome of a lengthy
investigation into the French oil giant Elf Aquitaine (now part of
Total-Fina-Elf), which has implicated many former executives and high French
government officials.
The French investigation into Halliburton, KBR and Cheney sheds further
light on the tense relations between the United States and France, which
were inflamed by the unilateral US decision to go to war with Iraq, as well
as the Bush administration's exclusion of French firms from bidding for
prime contracts for rebuilding the devastated country.
Apparently, KBR conducted itself just as arrogantly in Nigeria as the Bush
administration has in Iraq. Technip, the French junior partner in the
construction consortium, objected to the methods used to pay off Nigerian
officials, but KBR ignored its complaints, according to press reports.
Both Daniel Burlin, the former Technip finance director, and Jean
Desseilligny, the current general manager, have, in statements given to the
investigation, placed all responsibility on the American company, which was
the lead partner and initiated the payments.
Their account is bolstered by Halliburton's increasingly notorious record as
a corporate lawbreaker. Only eight months ago, Halliburton filed documents
with federal regulatory agencies in the US revealing that it had paid $2.4
million in bribes to a Nigerian tax official to get favorable treatment.
Halliburton fired several lower-level employees and claimed no senior
officers were involved.
In Iraq, Halliburton allegedly overcharged the US military $61 million on
contracts for delivering fuel. And last week, the company revealed that
several of its employees received kickbacks from a Kuwaiti subcontractor to
ignore a separate instance of overbilling in a contract for the US Army
Corps of Engineers. Halliburton sent a check for $6.3 million to the US Army
Materiel Command to refund that overcharge.
According to Le Figaro, Dan Etete, former Nigerian oil minister under the
Abacha dictatorship, was questioned last month as a state witness and
explained that Shell and KBR were the companies in overall control of the
project, the first in charge of gas exploitation, the other of industrial
development. Etete, who said he "feared for his life," said that Shell and
KBR had close and direct relationships with the dictatorship and did not
need the complex money-shuffling operation to pay off officials. Press
reports on his testimony suggested that some of the money could have been
diverted to the Republican Party in the United States.
Meanwhile, Vice President Cheney has emerged from the shadows and begun
public appearances in connection with the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign.
During the week of January 17-18, he sat for long interviews with the Los
Angeles Times, USA Today and the Washington Post, his first interviews with
daily newspapers in more than two years. Neither paper raised the issue of
the French court case or possible bribery charges. The Post published a long
front-page profile of Cheney January 26, noting his sudden increased
visibility, and, again, saying nothing of the Nigerian bribery case.
Wire service reports on the investigation into Cheney have been available
for weeks from Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press, and excerpts
have appeared in such daily newspapers as Newsday, the Dallas Morning News
and even the ultra-right Washington Times, controlled by the Reverend Sun
Myung Moon. But not a word has appeared in the New York Times, nor has the
subject been addressed in the nightly news broadcasts of the major
television networks.
It is worth contrasting their kid-glove treatment of Cheney with the frenzy
whipped up, especially by the New York Times and the Washington Post, over
the Whitewater investigation. A 15-year-old real-estate deal, involving
$150,000 of undeveloped land in the Ozarks, in which no criminal acts were
committed and Bill and Hillary Clinton lost money, but which became a cause
celebre in the American media. But there is virtually no media interest in
the ongoing probe into $180 million in bribes in which the vice president of
the United States may be directly implicated.
This is just one example of the systematic political vetting of the "news"
by the American mass media. Any development that tends to expose or compound
the crisis of the Bush administration, and the political establishment as a
whole, is routinely blacked out or relegated to a footnote.
This media blackout, however, is becoming increasingly difficult to
maintain, as further investigations into bribery in Nigeria unfold. Last
Friday, for example, five former Nigerian government officials, three of
them former cabinet ministers, appeared in court in Nigeria facing charges
of taking more than $1 million in bribes from SAGEMSA, a French electronics
company. The five include the labor minister, Husseini Akwanga, who was
fired after charges were brought, and former internal affairs ministers
Sunday Afolabi and Mahmud Shata.
The case was sparked by an incident last September, when British officials
at London's Heathrow airport arrested a Nigerian man, Chris Agidi, carrying
a briefcase packed with $200,000 in cash. Agidi, a lower-level civil
servant, was apparently a courier taking part of the payoffs overseas to
deposit in foreign banks.
The Associated Press reported the Friday court appearance in a dispatch that
made reference to the French investigation into Cheney and Halliburton. This
was published in the Baltimore Sun, that city's major daily newspaper, but
there was no coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or any of
the television networks.
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