The Unites States vice-president, Dick Cheney, helped to steer through a huge contract for the reconstruction of Iraq’s oil industry on behalf of his old firm, Halliburton, Time magazine reported on Monday.
The report, based on an internal Pentagon e-mail, joins a steady stream of allegations of cronyism involving Halliburton. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Houston company has won $17-billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq, far outstripping its competitors.
Cheney, who ran Halliburton for five years before he became George Bush’s vice-president in 2000, has maintained that he severed all links to the company when he entered public life.
However, Time said it had obtained an internal e-mail from a Pentagon official indicating that Cheney’s office had been intimately involved in awarding a multibillion-dollar contract for the restoration of Iraqi oil.
The e-mail, dated March 5 last year, said that Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defence for policy and an avid promoter of the war, had approved a contract with Halliburton ”contingent on informing WH [the White House] tomorrow”.
The e-mail says that Feith received authorisation for the Rio (Restore Iraqi Oil) contract from the deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz. The e-mail, from an unidentified official with the Army Corps of Engineers, says: ”We anticipate no issues, since action has been coordinated with the VP’s office.”
No other bids were sought, and Halliburton was awarded the contract.
A spokesperson for Cheney’s office denied any connection to the contract. ”The vice-president and his office have played no role in government contracting since he left private business to campaign for vice-president,” in 1999, Kevin Kellems said.
But Cheney has not severed his links with Halliburton. Last year, he received $178 437 in deferred compensation from the company.
Reports suggest that the process of awarding contracts has changed under the Bush administration. A report to the House of Representatives committee on government reform last week noted that $107-billion in contracts had been awarded without open competition. Nearly three-quarters of those exclusive arrangements — worth about $88-billion — involved work in Iraq, the report said. Halliburton has won a sizeable share of them. – Guardian Unlimited Â