The Cheney Connection

Was Halliburton, the oil conglomerate once headed by Dick Cheney, involved in a massive $180 million bribery scheme in Nigeria on Cheney's watch? Hopes that the veil may finally be lifted on yet another odoriferous Halliburton scandal were raised this month, when it was announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission has finally opened a formal investigation into the alleged bribery -- which French authorities have been probing for a year. In Paris, official documents revealing that Cheney might be among those indicted on corruption charges as a result of the French investigation made front-page news there last Christmas -- but not here.

The newly launched SEC probe was undoubtedly sparked by the latest revelations in the French investigation. A Halliburton London lawyer, Jeffrey Tesler -- identified by the French investigating magistrate conducting the international bribery probe as the bagman who controlled the secret $180 million "slush fund" set up (according to French press reports) by a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) -- admitted in mid-May, under oath, making two payments from the slush fund totaling nearly $1 million to two top KBR executives.

At the heart of the complicated scandal is a $6 billion gas-liquefaction factory -- one of the largest in the world -- built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton in partnership with a large French petro-engineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh. The French investigation is the first under a new statute, passed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and ratified by France in 2000, making bribe-giving in the course of business transactions a crime. The U.S. is one of the 30-country member signatories to the OECD conventions, and U.S. law has banned such payments for 25 years.

Judge Renaud Van Ruymbeke, France's best-known investigating magistrate who is heading the French probe of Halliburton, is notoriously independent with a reputation as "untouchable." Together with the famous Spanish investigating judge Baltasar Garzon and the former chief Geneva public prosecutor Bernard Bertossa, he was one of the initiators of a 1996 call for greater international cooperation on corruption cases signed by investigating magistrates from all over Europe and known in judicial circles as the "Geneva Appeal."

Van Ruymbeke -- no stranger to the unsavory world of oil-and-gas politics -- unearthed the existence of the $180 million fund now being investigated by the SEC. He made his name investigating a series of corruption scandals in which politicians of both right and left were convicted -- including a former cabinet member from Jacques Chirac's conservative coalition. Van Ruymbeke stumbled across the Halliburton scandal while investigating the oil giant Elf for corrupting and bribing public officials (a scandal that earned Elf's CEO, Loic LeFloch Prigent, a five-year prison sentence). Elf has had a raft of hand-in-glove dealings with Technip, the French firm now under investigation with Halliburton.

The roaming $180 million now being investigated by the SEC was first paid to the mysterious, 55-year-old Tesler -- who worked for Halliburton at the same time he was financial adviser to the late Nigerian dictator General Sami Abacha and controlled his personal fortune -- through a front company called TriStar that Tesler set up and controlled in the British tax haven of Gibraltar. TriStar, in turn, got the money from a consortium set up for the Nigeria refinery deal by Halliburton and Technip, and registered in the island fiscal paradise of Madeira.