« Ethics Refresher Course at the White House | Main | Ancient Hatreds, It's in their Blood, Etc. »
November 06, 2005
Iraqi Money
As regular readers of this blog know, I've been writing for a long time about this issue: billions of Iraq's money that has been squandered. For the first time, an auditing board has suggested a few hundred million of those billions be paid back.
An auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended yesterday that the United States repay as much as $208 million to the Iraqi government for contracting work in 2003 and 2004 assigned to Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary.The work was paid for with Iraqi oil proceeds, but the board said it was either carried out at inflated prices or done poorly. The board did not, however, give examples of poor work.
Some of the work involved postwar fuel imports carried out by K.B.R. that previous audits had criticized as grossly overpriced. But this is the first time that an international auditing group has suggested that the United States repay some of that money to Iraq. The group, known as the International Advisory and Monitoring Board of the Development Fund for Iraq, compiled reports from an array of Pentagon, United States government and private auditors to carry out its analysis.
A good start, but tip of the iceberg.
Posted by zeynep at November 6, 2005 05:23 PM
Comments
The British-American owner of a security firm that ships gasoline from Kuwait to Iraq told Congressional Democrats last summer that he had been to every oil refinery in Iraq and that he had not seen a single KBR worker at any of them. He said they were all broken down. His crews now carry their own generators, pumps, and even pipe fittings, as all of the basic necessities have been looted. And these are not necessities of refining -- these are necessities of just accepting, storing, and distributing gasoline. He said the fittings to attach his hoses to the tanks were sometimes gone.
Meanwhile, he says, KBR does have staff on the border, where they have made his crews' lives difficult.
Halliburton, which owns KBR, denied that the company had any control over the border.
Posted by: hedgehog at November 10, 2005 05:54 AM