The Halliburton Shuffle

[G_j]

The Halliburton Shuffle
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/013104J.shtml

The Halliburton Shuffle

    By Bob Herbert
    The New York Times
    Friday 30 January 2004

     Can you spell Halliburton? R-i-p- o-f-f.

     War-torn Iraq has been a gold mine for Halliburton, yet another treasure trove of U.S. taxpayer dollars for a company that has no peer in the fine art of extracting riches from the government.
     But if you go through some of Halliburton's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the past several years, as I have, you'll see a company that goes to great lengths — literally to the ends of the earth — to escape paying its fair share of taxes to the government that has been so good to it.

 Annual reports filed with the S.E.C. since the mid-90's — when Dick Cheney took over as chief executive and wrote the game plan for garnering government goodies — showed Halliburton subsidiaries incorporated in such places as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Panama, Liechtenstein, and Vanuatu.

     Vanuatu? Who knew?
     
Vanuatu is a mountainous group of islands in the South Pacific. Its people support themselves mostly by fishing and subsistence farming. "Additional revenues," according to the Columbia Encyclopedia, "derive from a growing tourist industry and the development of Vila as a corporate tax shelter."
...more..

[Seldona]

1. No surprise here.

The friggen VP of the United States was doing business in Iraq as late as 1999.

They can rent office space in a bank in the Caymans all they want to to skirt the law, but I am willing to bet even they know how wrong and illegal it is.

They just don't care.