LONDON: Halliburton, the engineering group formerly run by US vice- president Dick Cheney, has been given $1 billion worth of reconstruction work in Iraq by the US government without having to compete for it, thanks to repeated delays in opening up a key contract to competition.

The Houston-based company was controversially awarded a contract to repair Iraq’s damaged oil infrastructure without competition in February.

The cost-plus contract means the amount spent by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), which is running the work, is open- ended, rather than being fixed at the outset, because the scope of the damage was unknown. The USACE described the contract as a “bridge to competition”, but original plans to award the work competitively in August have repeatedly slipped. So far, $1.7 billion has been made available to Halliburton for the work.

Figures obtained from the USACE by Democrat Congressman Henry Waxman indicate that on Aug 21, around the time the contract should have been opened to competition, the amount made available to KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary involved, was $704 million. Since then the total has risen by $1.011 billion.—Dawn/The Observer News Service.