Piercing The Corporate Veil

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U.S. troops with food, water, laundry, housing, security, intelligence gathering and interrogation--everything except the actual killing. Halliburton also received major contracts to rebuild the country’s oil industry. Lesar authorized millions of dollars of payments to Cheney during his Vice Presidency. The payments were said to have been obligated by contract before Cheney left the company. Cheney swore he had nothing to do with the phenomenal growth of Halliburton’s government contracting or energy business. Distributing kickbacks, overcharging for fuel and meals that were never served, substituting contaminated drinking water for purified water, selling defective equipment that cost the lives of American soldiers (At least 18 soldiers were electrocuted in their showers due to improper grounding of electrical devices for which Halliburton subsidiary KBR was responsible), Iraqi civilians, and their own employees---under Lesar’s leadership, Halliburton engaged in war profiteering that dwarfed anything the country has ever known. And yet David Lesar remains a respected business leader among his peers and virtually unknown to the public. In a parody of corporate public relations, Lesar reminds those who question Halliburton’s corporate culture that “we are providing coveralls and two-piece work clothing that are sized for women. These better-fitting garments will improve the comfort and safety of our employees."
In 2005, he told Fortune Magazine writer Peter Elkind, “What we've done in Iraq is good --to the third power!" 2 And for all we know, he believes it. Nobody wants to think of himself as living an ignoble life. Sidebar? Pentagon auditors, the General Accounting Office, the Inspector General of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the Justice Department investigators disagreed. “…[T]he $2.5 billion Restore Iraqi Oil (RIO) agreement, that has generated the most suspicion about Cheney's hidden hand, because it was awarded secretly, on a no-bid basis, in March 2003, on the eve of war. Under this cost-plus contract, Halliburton was hired to put out oilfield fires and rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure. It is under this contract that KBR charged infamously high prices to ship gasoline into Iraq.”…. Several problems that have surfaced are of the jaw-dropping variety--subs charging $100 to wash a 15- pound bag of laundry, and so forth. Especially telling was an October 2004 Pentagon audit of the RIO contract. Out of $875 million in charges it examined, $108 million was deemed "questionable" or "unreasonable." This included Halliburton's claim to have spent $27.5 million to ship to Iraq liquefied gas it had purchased in Kuwait for just $82,100--a fee the audit calls "illogical." (A Halliburton spokeswoman responded that the company delivered "vital services for the Iraqi people at a fair and reasonable cost, given the circumstances.")… In 2004, the Government Accounting Office identified 17 Halliburton subsidiaries in tax haven countries, including 13 in the Cayman Islands. In 2003, Lesar had incorporated Halliburton Products and Services Ltd. in the Cayman Islands, enabling him to circumvent U.S. sanctions on doing business with Iran. With retired generals swinging through the Pentagon’s revolving doors and onto Halliburton’s payroll to lobby their Pentagon colleagues, the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower had warned the country about—unfortunately, not until his farewell address—was in full blown mania at Halliburton. Following Hurricane Katrina, Lesar dispatched former Bush the Second FEMA head Joe Albaugh, a Halliburton lobbyist, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where in Albaugh’s words; he "helped his clients get business from perhaps the worst natural disaster in the nation's history." Recently, Halliburton agreed to pay $1.1 billion to settle lawsuits brought over its role in the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig killed 11 workers and caused millions of barrels of oil to spill into the Gulf. Spill victims accused it of defective cementing work on the Macondo well. Halliburton blamed British Petroleum, which owned the well. 2 http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/04/18/8257012/index.htm
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