[rad-green] DOJ Buried Allegations That Cheney’ s Halliburton Subsidiary Paid Bribes for Venezuela Contracts

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/11/21/doj-buried-allegations-that-cheneys-halliburton-subsidiary-paid-bribes-for-venezuela-contracts/

*Consortium News               November 21, 2019 *

DOJ Buried Allegations That Cheney’s Halliburton Subsidiary Paid Bribes for
Venezuela Contracts
*Spurred by the recent U.S. attempt to overthrow the government of
Venezuela, Lucy Komisar offers a never-told story about the international
corruption of state oil company PdVSA many years ago, under a pro-business
administration in Caracas.*

*5 Rue des Italians, Paris. (Google Earth)*

*By **Lucy Komisar <https://consortiumnews.com/tag/lucy-komisar/>*
*Special to Consortium News*

*P*art of the ongoing U.S. demonization of the Nicolas Maduro government of
Venezuela is to accuse it of corruption. In 2017, for example, U.S.
prosecutors charged
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-usa-corruption-idUSKBN1FW2KE>
five
former Venezuelan officials under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)
with soliciting bribes in exchange for helping vendors win favorable
treatment from state oil company PdVSA from 2011 to 2015. (Hugo Chávez was
president 2006 to 2013, and Maduro became president in 2013.)

However, there’s another example of PdVSA bribery that the U.S. never felt
compelled to pursue. It is the alleged and never investigated Halliburton
bribery of Venezuelan oil company officials in the late 1990s when
Halliburton was run by Dick Cheney, who would leave it to become
vice-president under George W. Bush.

Exposing that story shines a light on the political motivation of
Washington’s current attacks on Venezuela.

The story involves Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root allegedly
participating in a payoff to PdVSA with its French partner Technip in order
to get oil facility construction contracts in Venezuela in 1997 and 1998.

This was revealed to a French investigating magistrate by the Technip
official who managed the bribe affair and who told me the story.

At that time in France, before 2000, foreign bribery was legal, only
kickbacks to French individuals and companies were barred. The magistrate
therefore determined there were no kickbacks and dropped the case. But his
investigation was reported at the time in the French press and would have
been seen by FBI officials at the U.S. embassy and by State Department
analysts at the embassy and in Washington. But the U.S. ignored this story
of a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violation.

*Rue des Italiens*

Over the course of two years, in 2001 and 2002, Georges Krammer paid
several visits to 5-7 Rue des Italiens, a classical stone edifice in the *cul
de sac* of an elegant Right-Bank boulevard in Paris, in which a French
magistrate, Renaud Van Ruymbeke, had an office.

During that time, Van Ruymbeke was investigating a bribery case concerning
Elf, the state-owned French oil giant. Krammer was of interest to him
because of Elf’s connection with Technip, a French company that constructed
drilling-and-production facilities for oil-and-gas fields. Krammer was
Technip’s general manager.

The meetings were private, but Krammer, in emails and conversations with me
almost 10 years ago, described some of what was said.

At first Van Ruymbeke was mainly interested in Ely Calil
<https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ely-calil-oil-tycoon-behind-wonga-coup-found-dead-after-fall-at-mansion-0qvqc86ng?region=global>,
a notorious Lebanese bagman who was accused of handling Elf bribes with
Nigeria but was released on appeal. But at a certain point, Krammer said,
Van Ruymbeke began to zero in on Technip’s overall bribe operation in
Nigeria as well as Venezuela. Foreign bribery, at the time was legal in
Europe, but domestic bribery was not. He was looking for illegal
“retro-commissions,” kickbacks to French citizens or political parties.

The multi-million-dollar bribe operation involved international
conglomerates using partnerships and subsidiaries to conduct business with
one another. A common denominator among them was the use of bribes to
grease work contracts in the oil-producing nations of Nigeria and Venezuela.

For U.S. companies the international relationships were key since bribing
foreign officials violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

One of the parent companies in this network was Halliburton, the
Houston-based multinational oil-services behemoth for which Dick Cheney,
the former U.S. vice president under George W. Bush, served as board
chairman and CEO from 1995 to 2000.

Officials for Technip, (which has since merged to form TechnipFMC with
headquarters in  London), declined to be interviewed. Halliburton declined
a request for comment on this article, as did Cheney’s office.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney in 2011. (Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

*Venezuelan Contracts Wanted*

Technip’s partners in Venezuela were Brown & Root, the
engineering-and-construction giant that has since been subsumed by a
merger, but was a Halliburton subsidiary at the time; Parsons E&C, a U.S.
provider of construction-management services that has since been acquired;
and two Venezuela firms. They wanted several contracts to build oil
production facilities in Venezuela. To get them, they would allegedly pay
bribes through a shell company, Contrina, which Technip set up in Paris.
(Georges Krammer’s name appears in Contrina’s listing in the French
corporate registry.)

 “The American companies make use of the European companies to pay the
bribes, because they could do it,” Krammer told me. Because bribery [in
Europe] had been legal until 2000, he said European companies were expert
at it. “They were working with U.S. companies,” said Krammer. “They told
them we will arrange everything, don’t worry. This is how Technip operated.”

Krammer told me that the bribes were around 1.5 percent of the value of the
contracts, which when combined were worth about $1.25 billion. Delivering
the payments was also lucrative business. During the time Krammer was
meeting with the judge, Karl Laske of the Paris daily *Libération *was
also investigating Ely Calil. Laske wrote in October 2002 that Technip had
paid bribes to get a contract to build an oil-refinery facility in
Venezuela and that Calil had had been awarded $8.5 million for handling
payoffs.

Ultimately, the judge did not bring the Venezuela case to court, since such
bribery of foreign officials was legal in France until 2000, when OECD
rules forced changes in national laws. Till then, French companies just had
to report the bribes to the French Treasury.

According to French court documents, Van Ruymbeke ultimately dropped the
case.

But the investigation that he began should have had consequences for some
of the U.S. entities and individuals involved in the Venezuelan network.

*No Probe Into Cheney *

Although the Nigerian bribery was already underway when Cheney took charge,
the Venezuelan operation began under the former vice president, via
Halliburton’s Brown & Root.

But though the U.S. Justice Department went after and fined the companies
and individuals in the Nigerian case, it never went after a
Halliburton/Brown & Root Venezuela bribery operation.

Krammer said the Venezuela bribes began in the late 1990s, with contracts
that Contrina signed in 1997 and 1998. They went to officials of the state
oil company, PdVSA (Petroléos de Venezuela) during the administration of
pro-business President Rafael Caldera, who preceded the leftist President
Hugo Chávez.

Former Venezuelan President Rafael Caldera in 1980. (Sucesión Caldera
Pietri/Fundación Tomás Liscano, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The two contracts were to build facilities in Port La Cruz, on the
Caribbean, that would upgrade extra heavy oil produced in the Orinoco
region of Venezuela. The upgrader turned the oil into synthetic crude
(syncrude), so it could be shipped in tankers to Conoco’s U.S. refineries,
most of it to the Westlake site in Louisiana. The oil deposit was expected
to last 35 years.

“Contrina, based in Technip offices in France, gathered the agreements of
its U.S. partners to pay the bribes,” Krammer told me in an email in 2011.
“Contrina SNC paid the bribes to Rossven (offshore vehicle for bribery).”
He said the beneficiary of Rossven was the bagman Calil who did what was
necessary.

Krammer said, “Brown & Root, Parsons and Technip signed papers that we can
place the bribe with Calil.” He said the U.S. signatories on the agreement
were Senior Vice President Lawrence J. Pope for Brown & Root and Bill Hall
for Parsons E&C. Payments were made in 1998 and 99. They were sent from a
Contrina Paris bank account owned by Krammer.

“Who got the bribes? I’ve no idea,” Krammer said. “It’s individuals helping
to get the contract. There is always a recommendation. The people you bribe
are the local ones. People related to PdVSA.”

Brown & Root’s participation in Contrina was reported by trade publications
<http://www.hydrocarbons-technology.com/projects/petrozuata/> at the time.

Portion of Venezuela’s Caribbean coastline with Puerto La Cruz circled. (Google
Earth)

*Bribe Handlers*

When Van Ruymbeke began meeting with Krammer almost 18 years ago, he was
interested in Krammer’s tenant-landlord connection with Ely Calil, the
bribe handler for Elf’.

 “He found out Calil was in contact with Technip,” Krammer said. “He found
out the owner of my apartment was Calil.”

Van Ruymbeke thought that Krammer might have bribed Calil to get the
apartment, which would have been a crime.

“It was just when I retired in 2001,” Krammer said. “I wanted to rent the
apartment with a contract. And I paid. When Van Ruymbeke discovered this,
he said you got a kickback and bought the apartment, which was not correct.
After a year, he said there is no evidence Georges has a kickback, so he
released me from the case.”

Over the course of their conversations, Krammer showed Van Ruymbeke the
contract and records of the Contrina partners’ due diligence investigations
of Calil for the deal in Venezuela.

Krammer waited for Technip to bail him out on the Venezuela bribery
charges, but the firm didn’t. Technip officials denied knowing Calil and
accused Krammer, who admitted he handled the bribe payments*.*

Krammer, in turn, began trying to prove that bribery was a Technip policy
and told Van Ruymbeke how Technip’s payoff system worked — in Indonesia,
Thailand and at the Bonny Island gas plant in Nigeria. He also showed Van
Ruymbeke the Venezuela contracts and records of the due-diligence
investigations of Calil that the partners associated in Contrina had
carried out before hiring him to be their bagman.

In October 2002, Van Ruymbeke got a copy of the “DAS,” a document that in
French means a “declaration of honorariums and other remunerations,” which
Technip had filed with the French Treasury to report bribes.

Krammer said that in its DAS, Technip would have to declare the other
companies involved and indicate if each was paying the same bribe. But the
judge saw no mention of the Boney Island Nigeria gas-plant bribery or the
case in Venezuela in Technip’s disclosure of foreign bribery. The judge
began to track both bribe operations.

When Krammer saw the DAS, he said, “I told Van Ruymbeke, ‘This is why they
didn’t want to give you the DAS, because there were missing projects.’”

Portion of Puerto La Cruz with oil facilities.  (Google Earth)

*My Own Investigation*

I came across Van Ruymbeke’s bribery investigation against Brown & Root and
partners about 10 years ago, while investigating the contemporaneous bribery
of Nigerian officials by Halliburton
<http://www.gasandoil.com/news/africa/e586d566baa4a1e2e43c03d52d603f29> and
its partners in France, Italy and Japan. The case, which drew plenty of
press coverage, involved construction of gas plants and was settled in the
U.S. with fines.

Technip by then had been shown to be a key collaborator in a corrupt
Nigerian deal with M.W. Kellogg, a London-based engineering and
construction subsidiary of the U.S. company Dresser Industries. (In 1998
Kellogg entered Halliburton’s web of corporate relationships when its
parent, Dresser, merged with Halliburton. Following that merger, Kellogg
combined with Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root to form KBR.)

Halliburton’s even cursory due diligence before buying Dresser should have
revealed that its subsidiary Kellogg led a Nigeria project which included
Technip. And that Halliburton’s own construction subsidiary Brown & Root
was involved with Technip in Venezuela. The Nigeria bribery records after
1998 belonged to Halliburton.

But Dick Cheney was never charged or interrogated about the Nigeria
bribery. The Bush administration made plea bargains with all the companies
involved, so that no documentation was made public.

The U.S. Justice Department never brought charges against Halliburton/Brown
& Root for the Venezuela payoffs. One can’t know if they ever investigated
it. The Justice Department never mentioned it.

Once the Venezuelan case fizzled in the U.S. I filed away my notes on
Krammer and Van Ruymbeke’s investigation. But the recent U.S. attempt to
overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicolás Maduro, and the
hailstorm of official invective against the Chavista system, made me think
the story was worth finally telling.

*Lucy Komisar (@lucykomisar) is an investigative journalist whose stories
are available at **http://thekomisarscoop.com/*
<http://thekomisarscoop.com/>*. *

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