CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

66 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
taxes for the local subsidiary. Turns out the “consultant” was a FIRS officer
himself, in a position to make the tax go away.
The really big scandal centers on a $4.9 billion project in Nigeria. Natural
gas, produced together with Nigeria’s oil and almost entirely bled off
and burned for three decades, is now being piped into gathering systems,
processed, frozen, and shipped to foreign buyers. A contract for expansion
of the liquefied natural gas plant was given in the mid-1990s to a consortium
of four companies: Technip of France, Snamprogetti Netherlands, an
affiliate of ENI of Italy, Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), now a subsidiary
of Halliburton, and JGC Corporation of Japan. The four companies
formed a joint venture called TSKJ, drawing on the first initials of each corporate
name. This entity, along with a second consortium entity known as
LNG Servicos, was based in that nice little Portuguese tax haven, the island
of Madeira.
Among the four partners, KBR was the coordinator of the project. A
London lawyer named Jeffrey Tesler reportedly had a relationship with Halliburton
dating from the 1980s and also was allegedly an advisor to Sani
Abacha. 24 At some point in the 1990s he was designated as an agent to represent
TSKJ in Nigeria. He formed Tri-Star Investments in Gibraltar and
made only one trip to Nigeria, yet from 1995 to 2002 payments totaling
$166 million were reportedly made out of a TSKJ “slush fund” to Tri-Star
accounts in Switzerland and Monaco. In 2002 a French prosecutor pursuing
the much-publicized bribery scandal involving Elf Aquitaine and French
politicians chanced upon information regarding these payments. An investigating
judge, Renaud van Ruymbeke, was assigned to the case. Thus far he
has reportedly turned up payments of $2.5 million into a Swiss bank account
belonging to former Nigerian oil minister Daniel Etete, 25 $5 million
into a Swiss bank account of the former chairman of KBR Albert Stanley, 26
and more than $1 million to William Chaudan, also a former KBR executive.
27 It is suspected that much of the remaining millions was transferred to
Abacha and other Nigerian government figures.
In 2003 a senior official of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission
said, “Most of the cases of corruption in Nigeria are linked to the
operations of multinationals in the country.” 28 In June 2004, Halliburton’s
chief financial officer was quoted saying, “As anyone who does business in
Nigeria knows, one needs an agent in Nigeria.” 29 This struck some people as
a justification for bribery. Halliburton beat a hasty retreat, severed relation-