Halliburton’s crimes

Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, Wellpoint insurance, Massey Energy, and Halliburton, the giant oil services company.

The staff of the presidential commission investigating the BP oil spill has just revealed that Halliburton executives knew the cement it was using to seal BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well was likely to be unstable but didn’t tell BP or act on the information.

Halliburton is not exactly a model citizen. It has evaded U.S. taxes and export bans through foreign subsidiaries; admitted to bribing foreign officials (a subsidiary paid $2.4 million to a Nigerian government official in exchange for favorable tax treatment); conceded in an internal memo (leaked to the Wall Street Journal) its cost controls for government contracts in Iraq were “antiquated” and its procurement “disorganized; was found by Pentagon auditors to have overcharged estimated at $27.4 million for meals served to American troops at five military bases in Iraq and Kuwait (in one camp billing for an average 42,000 meals a day but serving only 14,000).