Halliburton bribes Nigerian Taxk Official

[Gem]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1503&ncid=1503&e=14&u=/afp/20030509/ts_afp/us_halliburton_ethics_030509175123

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Oil services giant Halliburton, already under fire over accusations that its White house ties helped win a major Iraqi oil contract, has admitted that a subsidiary paid a multi-million dollar bribe to a Nigerian tax official.

Waxman, the top-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives' committee on government reform, asked for an explanation.

As if they didn't look bad enough.

It damgages their credibility, but this has nothing to do with Iraq/Cheney (the deal was done in 2001-2002).

Anybody wants to add to the conspiracy theory?

Gem

[Clancie]

Hmmm....I wonder how many other bribes we'll soon be learning out about from Halliburton and its subsidiaries?

[reprise]

I can't wait to see what creative use the 419 scamsters make of this one...

[corplinx]

They need an explanation? Nigeria isnt fScking Tennessee. If you do business in sub-saharan africa, bribes are the way you do it. Its _expected_. Westerners crossing borders are met with a hand out. Africa is simply a mess and if you don't bride you can possibly die.

That a senator needs this spelled out for him is embarassing. Another case of blinders installed from too much time in the ivory tower.

[Agammamon]

No, no, you've all got it wrong. It wasn't a bribe. He was just giving the guy some money so the Nigerian would be able to help the president of the Nigerian bank get money out of the country (for a small cut of the proceeds of course).

[renata]

Originally posted by corplinx
They need an explanation? Nigeria isnt fScking Tennessee. If you do business in sub-saharan africa, bribes are the way you do it. Its _expected_. Westerners crossing borders are met with a hand out. Africa is simply a mess and if you don't bride you can possibly die.

That a senator needs this spelled out for him is embarassing. Another case of blinders installed from too much time in the ivory tower.


Although that is true of business making in most third world countries, I believe it is illegal for US companies to bribe outside companies or countries. I heard it this morning on the radio, so I don't have a link, but apparently there is some sort of foreign corruption act that prohibits this very behavior.

[crackmonkey]

Do you have any idea how common bribery is outside the US and Europe? Try setting up a manufacturing plant in Mexico without greasing some palms. It would never happen.

[Cain]

Originally posted by corplinx
They need an explanation? Nigeria isnt fScking Tennessee. If you do business in sub-saharan africa, bribes are the way you do it. Its _expected_. Westerners crossing borders are met with a hand out. Africa is simply a mess and if you don't bride you can possibly die.

That a senator needs this spelled out for him is embarassing. Another case of blinders installed from too much time in the ivory tower.

Silliness. "They have to bribe those government in order to conduct business because those governments are corrupt!"

Ignoring the possibility of confusion between cause and effect,
you see nothing wrong with a U.S. corporation lending support to a corrupt government?

Remember how a few Republicans attributed the inflated stock prices and corporate scandels to Clinton? They "argued" that Clinton set a bad example as an executive and all these other CEOs emulated his style in office. Hmmmm..., but I would think that Halliburtan, formerly headed by Cheney, might be above this kind of egregious corporate malfeasance. It doesn't really matter that this specific company was involved. An American company bribed a corrupt government, and we as Americans are responsible. You're right that none of this is surprising. What's surprising is that these crimes are open to rationalization.

[ceo_esq]

It’s possible that these payments violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA). That law prohibits American companies from making direct or indirect payments to foreign officials to induce the recipient to use his position to direct business to the payor.

It’s not entirely settled whether payments used to obtain favorable tax treatment in the foreign jurisdiction (as in Halliburton’s case) run afoul of the FCPA, but the Justice Department has previously argued that they do. The decision in a recent federal district court case (where the government lost) suggests that Halliburton may be legally in the clear.

Of course, especially in the Third World, there is often a very fine (sometimes virtually nonexistent) line between bribery and customarily accepted business practices. Companies from all over the world bribe foreign officials on a daily basis. In fact, years after the FCPA was adopted, Congress became concerned that the U.S. legislation was placing American companies at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis foreign companies. So the United States spearheaded a multilateral treaty on the subject (the Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions) and prevailed upon many of its major trading partners to agree to ban such corrupt payments, thereby restoring everyone to an equal footing (in theory).

The anti-bribery convention is quite recent, however. Bear in mind that the United States was the first (and for many years, the only) industrialized country to take the view that there might be something wrong with private companies bribing foreign public officials, and it had to work pretty hard to persuade its trading partners to adopt the same perspective.