Will Vice President Cheney be indicted...

[Diane Monaco <diane.monaco@xxxxxxxxx>]

Will Vice President Cheney be indicted?and will the US media report it?
By Patrick Martin
28 January 2004

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.