Halliburton was founded by Erie P. Halliburton in Duncan Oklahoma in 1919. Today this company employs over 50,000 people in 70 countries, making it the second largest oilfield service in the world. Halliburton first expanded into the Middle East in 1946 where it began performing services for the Arabian-American Oil Company.
In November 2002 Kellogg, Brown and Root, a branch company off of Halliburton, was tasked to plan oil well firefighting in Iraq and in February 2003 KBR was issued a contract to conduct the work. There was much suspicion around this because certain people believed this was a no-bid contract. A no-bid contract is when there is only one person or company that can provide the contractual services needed. These contracts are often fraught with suspicion that the company used illegal or immoral means to exclude competitors. In this case people believed that the reason KBR was awarded the position was because Dick Cheney, their former chairman and CEO, was the Vice President at the time.
In January 2006 Halliburton was awarded $386 million by the department of Homeland Security to build “temporary detention and processing facilities” or internment camps. In that same year Halliburton anticipated that their $2.5 billion “Restore Iraqi Oil” contract would pay for itself as well as for reconstruction of the entire country through oil that was being exported from Iraq’s northern oil fields. However, they did not export as much oil as expected.
Bunnatine Greenhouse, a civil servant group with 20 years of contracting experience, has complained to Army officials on numerous occasions that Halliburton had been unlawfully receiving special treatment for work in Iraq, Kuwait and the Balkans. Their claims were that Military auditors caught Halliburton overcharging the Pentagon for fuel deliveries into Iraq and also that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s office took control of every aspect of Halliburton’s $7 billion Iraqi oil/infrastructure contract.
The Federal Contractor Misconduct Database details 10 instances of misconduct since 1995 under which Halliburton has agreed to pay settlements of $791 million. A further twenty-two instances of misconduct relate to the company’s former subsidiary, KBR. Overall, I’m not 100% sure how I feel about this company right now; however, it is completely obvious that something fishy is going on.
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