Monday 25th of November 2024
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treason inc .....

treason inc .....

 

‘Oil services giant Halliburton Co. will soon shift its corporate headquarters from Houston to the Mideast financial powerhouse of Dubai, chief executive Dave Lesar announced Sunday.

"Halliburton is opening its corporate headquarters in Dubai while maintaining a corporate office in Houston," spokeswoman Cathy Mann said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "The chairman, president and CEO will office from and be based in Dubai to run the company from the UAE."

Lesar, speaking at an energy conference in nearby Bahrain, said he will relocate to Dubai from Texas to oversee Halliburton's intensified focus on business in the Mideast and energy-hungry Asia, home to some of the world's most important oil and gas markets.

"As the CEO, I'm responsible for the global business of Halliburton in both hemispheres and I will continue to spend quite a bit of time in an airplane as I remain attentive to our customers, shareholders and employees around the world," Lesar said. "Yes, I will spend the majority of my time in Dubai."

Lesar's announcement appears to signal one of the highest-profile moves by a U.S. corporate leader to Dubai, an Arab boomtown where free-market capitalism has been paired with some of the world's most liberal tax, investment and residency laws.’

Halliburton Will Move HQ to Dubai

meanwhile, Time magazine asks ….

‘Is this about tax breaks? Getting beyond the reach of congressional subpoenas? And what about all that sensitive information that Halliburton has had access to? At a minimum, reincorporating in Dubai would mean that Halliburton will be paying less taxes to the U.S. Treasury, even as it collects billions from government contracts.

The last paragraph of the FT story begins to answer the questions about Halliburton's, uh, interestingly timed decision to move its corporate headquarters:

Dubai has long positioned itself as a regional business hub, with a laisser faire attitude to business regulations. The government has launched several free zones allowing foreign firms to circumvent laws barring foreigners owning businesses.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chair Henry Waxman is "already planning to hold a hearing" on the move, Tumutly reported. Halliburton has brought the added scrutiny upon itself. In February, Waxman's committee found the U.S. government has wasted $10 billion in Iraq on "overpriced contracts or undocumented costs," and of that amount, more than $2.7 billion were charged by Halliburton. In one especially egregious case, the company "failed to protect the water supply it is paid to purify for U.S. soldiers throughout Iraq, in one instance missing contamination that could have caused 'mass sickness or death,'" according to an internal company report.’

Blessed is Blix, Rotten is Bush

From the Guardian

After the event

Hans Blix has decided that the Iraq war was 'clearly illegal'. Fine, but discovering a bit of backbone now is four years too late.
Scott Ritter


March 13, 2007 7:30 PM

In a statement reflective of the blinding obvious reinforced by the convenient passage of time, Hans Blix, the former head of the UN weapons inspectors operating in Iraq prior to the March 2003 invasion by the US and UK, in a slap at the policies of George Bush and Tony Blair, noted that "If they'd [Bush and Blair] allowed us to carry on the inspections a couple of months more, then we would have been able to go to all of the sites suspected of by intelligence. And since there weren't any weapons, we would have been able to come up with that answer: there are no weapons at all the sites you've given us."

--------------

Gus: Scott Ritter is conveniently allowing the time-line that went against Blix in his search for Saddam's WMDs that did not exist. The US, Australia and the UK, like all other countries in the world with a proper "intelligence" network knew that Saddam DID NOT HAVE weapons of mass destruction... But the CIA outfit and Colin Powell with his images of trucks in the middle of the desert assuring the UN they were making chemicals/biological weapons, were all part of a plot to confuse the issue and go to war no matter what. Blix asked for an extension of two/three months to investigate sites "that the CIA" had told him had WMDs, with CIA provided maps, and like any other sites and previous maps (some were really crook — even one map had the north arrow pointing south — Blix would have found NOTHING.

The US did not want Blix to find nothing because that would REMOVE the incentive to go to war. Thus in order to go to war, the US and their little dogs, Australia and the UK, had to let doubts about these sites become certainties, but it "was becoming too dangerous" (the truth could be exposed) to dilly fart longer trying to find what they knew was not there. Thus they had to stop Blix from not finding what they knew did not exist. War became the way for these crooks. Blix was distressed about it but he had been highly PRESSURED by the US not to believe the 12000-pages report from which the US censure a lot, to hide their own supplies of WMDs to Saddam in the 1980s.

Yes Mr Blix, the US held a which hunt... No matter what you did, they tried to deceive you at any opportunity, and they were set on war, no matter what. At ANY COST.

renegades on the run .....

The questions about Halliburton's sudden & decidedly inelegant move to Dubai just keep on coming .....

US Senate Commerce Committee member, Democrat Byron Dorgan, asked yesterday: “I want to know, is Halliburton trying to run away from bad publicity on their contracts? Are they trying to run away from the obligation to pay US taxes? Or are they trying to set up a corporate presence in Dubai, so that they can avoid the restrictions that currently exist on doing business with prohibited countries like Iran?”’

sharing the pain .....

The U.S. military paid a Florida company nearly $32 million to build barracks and offices for Iraqi army units even though nothing was ever built, Pentagon investigators reported. 

The project had to be abandoned because the Iraqi Defense Ministry couldn't obtain rights to the land where the headquarters were to be built, according to a report released this month by the Defense Department's Office of Inspector General.

Contracting records show the buildings would have housed one brigade and three battalions of the Iraqi military in Ramadi, a hotbed of the Sunni Muslim insurgency and capital of Anbar province.

Still, the Air Force agency overseeing the project paid contractor Ellis Environmental Group $31.9 million of the $34.2 million obligated for the project, the report said.

US Paid $32M For Iraqi Base That Wasn't Built