More Annals of Global Greed Inc.

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Halliburton and its former KBR subsidiary have agreed to pay $579 million in fines to settle criminal and regulatory charges of having bribed foreign officials to win billions in construction contracts. There may be some taxpayer comfort in the fact that this scandal was rooted in Nigeria, not Iraq, where the Halliburton megacorporation (you know, the one Dick Cheney ran before he became vice president) reaped multibillions as the Bush administration’s most favored no-bid contractor.

Still, there are a lot of unanswered questions about Halliburton’s practices in Iraq, with numerous complaints of overpricing and ineptitude. Its corporate conduct in the Nigerian scheme is hardly encouraging and should compel tighter scrutiny of its Iraq failures.

Across a decade, KBR and Halliburton paid $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials to secure $6 billion in contracts for building natural gas processing equipment. Under the settlement with federal authorities, Halliburton will pay most of the penalties, with KBR, its subsidiary during the bribery scheme, pleading guilty to hiring international bagmen to regularly grease Nigerian officials with million-dollar satchels of cash. A former KBR executive who deemed bribery a worthwhile cost of doing business now faces prison time.

The current KBR hierarchy declares that the malefactors are now all gone, and says that the record-sized penalties have closed an “unfortunate chapter in KBR’s rich and storied history.” Just how rich and storied is suggested in the settlement’s provision that KBR “disgorge” $177 million in “ill-gotten profits.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15sun3.html?th&emc=th