| Govt and the Halliburton
scandal
By Sun News
Friday, July 2, 2004
Halliburton, the oil services firm enmeshed in a bribe scandal
involving the payment of $180 million slush funds on the Nigeria
Liquefied Gas project to some unnamed Nigerian officials,
recently wielded the big axe on two of its executives fingered
in the criminal conduct.
The two unnamed officials, according to the report, were dismissed
by the oil firm for their roles in the payment of the illegal
funds to the yet-to-be named Nigerian official even while
the American Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice
Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigations are still
making efforts to establish the degree of culpability of its
nationals fingered in the bribery saga.
Since the bribe story broke some time last year in the United
States, we had expected the Nigerian government to seize the
initiative by collaborating with its American counterpart
with a view to getting to the root of the sordid affair. Rather,
what we have seen on the part of the government is the characteristic
dithering, a peculiar and uncanny indifference to a matter
which involves the subversion of the laws and the manipulation
of national institutions by a foreign organisation in the
guise of doing business.
The interesting part of the puzzle is that the current investigations
were at the behest of the American government, which feels
rightly that the conduct of its nationals both at home and
abroad would be governed by strict rules of ethical practice,
and which Halliburton has evidently been in breach. Given
that the federal government was an interested party in the
affair, one would have expected that it would take more than
a passing interest not just in the investigations, but would
launch its own inquiry at establishing the extent of its laws
that were broken by the foreign firm, and at the same time,
identifying and punishing the Nigerian accomplices in the
criminal conspiracy.
It is certainly a matter of grave national embarrassment that
the federal government seems not to have woken up to the realisation
that the crime for which the firm was fingered is actually
injurious to our national cause, a fact that may partly explain
the official prevarications; we suspect that the same reason
may well explain why the nation has not been availed of the
full facts on the scandal.
Whatever may be the outcome of the secretive inquiry, the
report of which the government has promised would be released
later this month, the government certainly has a lot of explanations
to offer Nigerians on why the so-called highly placed Nigerians
who took the $180 million bribe and their criminal accomplices
cannot be identified and brought to book.
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