WASHINGTON, April 9: Two US lawmakers have called for investigations into the awarding of reconstruction contracts for post-war Iraq to a company once headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Democrat Congressmen Henry Waxman and John Dingell are urging the General Accounting Office, Congress’s investigating arm, to look into the awarding of contracts to Texas energy giant Halliburton.
In a letter to the accounting office, the two lawmakers suggested that Halliburton’s ties to Mr Cheney may have enabled it to get “special treatment” in the awarding of Defence Department contracts.
Mr Cheney served as Halliburton’s chief executive for five years before he resigned in August 2000 to be George Bush’s presidential running mate. Congressmen Waxman and Dingell revealed that Mr Cheney receives $180,000 a year from Halliburton.
The company says he is paid only deferred compensation earned while working at the company, having elected not to receive a lump-sum payment.
The congressmen said the Bush administration awarded one of the company’s subsidiaries “a string of lucrative contracts over the last two years.”
Separately, the two legislators asked the accounting office to investigate the eight contracts being awarded by the US Agency for International Development to rebuild and run key institutions in Iraq after the war.
In February and March AID secretly sent requests for bids on those contracts to US companies that held security clearances and had done work for the agency.
This streamlined process, sidestepping public tenders, is used for contracts where national security is a concern.
The contracts involve at least $1.7 billion of work — from rebuilding Iraq’s roads, bridges, airports, schools, hospitals and government ministries to running them.
So far, AID has awarded just two of the contracts, including one to manage the seaport of Umm Qasr. The winner of the contract to rebuild Iraq’s schools is expected to be announced this week.
The biggest contract by far is the $600 million physical reconstruction job. AID said Halliburton was not among the finalists for the big construction contract.
The company said it chose not to seek the work, but its Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary could still serve as a major subcontractor on the reconstruction job.
That subsidiary has already won an exclusive, no-bid contract from the Army Corps of Engineers to extinguish oil-well fires in Iraq, for $50,000 a day.
It got the job through having a plan to extinguish such fires, conceived under a logistics contract it won in 2001.
