DOJ Buried Allegations That Cheney's Halliburton Subsidiary Paid Bribes for Venezuela Contracts
November 21, 2019 • 0 Comments
Spurred by the recent U.S. attempt to overthrow the government of Venezuela, Lucy Komisar offers a never-told story about the international corruption of state oil company PdVSA many years ago, under a pro-business administration in Caracas.
5 Rue des Italians, Paris. (Google Earth)
By Lucy Komisar
Special to Consortium News
Part of the ongoing U.S. demonization of the Nicolas Maduro government of Venezuela is to accuse it of corruption. In 2017, for example, U.S. prosecutors charged five former Venezuelan officials under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) with soliciting bribes in exchange for helping vendors win favorable treatment from state oil company PdVSA from 2011 to 2015. (Hugo Chávez was president 2006 to 2013, and Maduro became president in 2013.)
However, there’s another example of PdVSA bribery that the U.S. never felt compelled to pursue. It is the alleged and never investigated Halliburton bribery of Venezuelan oil company officials in the late 1990s when Halliburton was run by Dick Cheney, who would leave it to become vice-president under George W. Bush.
Exposing that story shines a light on the political motivation of Washington’s current attacks on Venezuela.
The story involves Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root allegedly participating in a payoff to PdVSA with its French partner Technip in order to get oil facility construction contracts in Venezuela in 1997 and 1998.
This was revealed to a French investigating magistrate by the Technip official who managed the bribe affair and who told me the story.
At that time in France, before 2000, foreign bribery was legal, only kickbacks to French individuals and companies were barred. The magistrate therefore determined there were no kickbacks and dropped the case. But his investigation was reported at the time in the French press and would have been seen by FBI officials at the U.S. embassy and by State Department analysts at the embassy and in Washington. But the U.S. ignored this story of a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violation.
More:
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/11/21/doj-buried-allegations-that-cheneys-halliburton-subsidiary-paid-bribes-for-venezuela-contracts/