Cost of Taking Fuel to Iraq Is Questioned (NYT)

[spindrifter]

By JAMES GLANZ
Published: November 7, 2006

A Halliburton subsidiary charged the Iraqi government as much as $25,000 per month for each of as many as 1,800 fuel trucks that were to deliver gasoline to Iraq after the 2003 invasion, but the trucks often spent days or weeks sitting idle on the border, says a report released yesterday by an auditing agency sponsored by the United Nations.

The agency said in a statement that the auditing firm it hired had found that some of the contract costs that had been questioned earlier seemed to be justified. But the agency said the findings raised new questions about hundreds of millions of dollars billed by the company under a $2.4 billion contract that the Army awarded on the eve of the conflict to KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root.

<snip>

In the chaos after the invasion, the contract was divided into various work orders that called for services like fuel deliveries and the repair of Iraqi oil infrastructure. The audit found, for example, that in an $871 million work order for delivering fuel to Iraq, just $112 million was actually spent on the fuel itself — gasoline, kerosene and liquid petroleum gas.

But $694 million was paid to a Kuwaiti subcontractor, “primarily for fuel transportation,” the audit says. The audit lays out a prime reason for those costs. KBR leased a fleet of tanker trucks from a well-connected Kuwaiti company, Altanmia, at a cost of up to $25,575 a month for each truck “irrespective of the number of deliveries” to Iraq, the audit says.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/07/world/middleeast/07contracts.html?ei=5094&en=3cd17a7bf7266daa&hp=&ex=1162875600&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1162872151-E//j8H4fGc7qDcbvCMze4Q

[LynnTheDem]

1. There is no doubt; bush & his cronies are the biggest pile of

stinking corruption in world history.

Guaranteed, that will be written in history. In your time, bush, so no worries about missing it by being dead. ;)

[MethuenProgressive]

2. "Coal to Newcastle" - ala Bush Co.