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 Daily Independent Online.
* Friday, July 23, 2004.
Halliburton
scam: Nigerian
officials shared N25b, says investigators
By
Chinedu Offor
Correspondent,
Washington
D.C
International
investigators probing the activities of American oil services giant
Halliburton have alleged that the company may have paid over $180 million
(N25.2 billion) in bribes to top Nigerian officials to award the contract
for the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) project.
Sources
allege that the affected
officials received payments from the contractors' agent, identified as a
prominent British lawyer.
The
project, one of the biggest of its kind, was awarded at an initial cost
of $3.6 billion in September 1994 when Don Etiebet was Minister of
Petroleum Resources. He was sacked five months later by late Head of
State Sani Abacha.
The
successful bidding consortium, TSKJ made up of Technip of France,
Snamprogetti of Italy, Kellog Brown & Root of the United States and
Japan Gas Company, is the object of five separate investigations in
several countries. Daily
Independent has learnt of the behind the scene drama disagreements
among the principal officers involved in the project over how the
contract was awarded.
Sources
said Etiebet was so concerned about
the due process of the contract bid that he wrote a memo dated
September 22, 1994 to the then NLNG Chairman Mohammadu Dikko Yusuf where he told him that the board
"seriously tinkered with
the integrity of the pending contract award".
After
a meeting with
representatives of the rival
bidders in the same month in London, it was learnt
that Etiebet concluded that "there has been breaches of
commercial confidentiality which may have benefited the competing
consortium that eventually won the bid”.
He
reportedly complained to Abacha about his reservations but was ignored.
Etiebet
was said to have told him and the NLNG board, through a memo, that
"the rival consortium has unfair discretion evaluation with unequal
and unclear penalty levies, the board had been told from certain quarters
which group was the preferred bidder".
He
also alleged shortly after the contract was awarded to TSKJ that he was
contacted by someone from London claiming to be a consultant working for
Kellogg (subsidiary of Halliburton) who wanted to set up "an
arrangement”. He told Etiebet his codename was "London
weather".
Etiebet
reportedly retorted: "I would never trust London weather".
Yusuf,
however, questions the account of Etiebet. He dismissed insinuations that the board's conduct was
not above board, saying the NLNG management had “maintained the integrity
of the bids at all times".
He
explained that the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) which evaluated the
bids was a shareholders' committee and that the management was "not in a position to
guarantee confidentiality once information was passed to it or to
government officials".
He admonished Etiebet for
meeting representatives of rival contractors. In a letter to him dated
September 23, 1994, Yusuf said: " I would rather agree with the
technical advisor's evaluation and recommendation supported by all
shareholders than to listen to a losing contractor to whom we have no
obligation to explain why or how we did what we did".
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