Re: Bush Awards Halliburton Huge Contracts Paid for by American Tax Payers While Halliburton Moves it's Operations to TAX FREE Dubai

Think about this. When you tax a corporation, who is "really" paying the tax? Perhaps it is a case of giving on one hand, and taking away with the other hand? When you tax a corporation, what does the corporation do? Add that as a cost of doing business, and simply charge a little more to cover the cost of the tax?

"9 Trillion Dollar Republican National Debt" <icadserve2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1190076036.257804.161070@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
March 14, 2007

Halliburton: From Bush's Favorite to a National Disgrace

It is a symbol of American cronyism, the beneficiary of lucrative Iraq
contracts thanks to its relationship with *** Cheney. Now Halliburton
is relocating to Dubai - and US politicians are outraged.

by Andrew Buncombe

The story begins in 1919 with Erle Halliburton sitting up late one
night with his wife, Vida, worrying about money. Squeezed together in
their one-room home in the Oklahoma dustbowl town of Wilson, the
couple were trying to work out how to meet the next payment on
Halliburton's fledgling business, the New Method Oil Well Cementing
Company.


With today's technologies, there's no real reason to have to
physically relocate. Those that have are trying to evade US oversight
and tax authorities. And Dubai is a tax-free haven - no corporate or
employee taxes.

Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies
At about 1am, so the story goes, the pale light from a small lamp
reflected off his wife's wedding ring. "I sat there admiring it when
the thought came to me," Vida would later tell Jeffrey Rodengen,
author of The Legend of Halliburton. "Here is the money we need. At
first hubby would not listen to me... but I argued we could get it
back. So we went to sleep all thrilled with the new idea of cementing,
the new means of getting jobs, and the money."

The rest, as is so often said, is history. Halliburton pawned his
wife's wedding ring and set to work servicing drilling operations not
just on the Healdton oilfield close to where they lived in Oklahoma,
but also in Louisiana and Texas. The following year he changed the
company's name to the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company.

Today, almost 90 years after Vida Halliburton's eyes glanced upon the
gold band around her finger, the company that took the family name is
now a vast multinational with operations in more than 120 countries.
It enjoys a remarkably close relationship with the Bush administration
whose Vice-President, *** Cheney, was its CEO between 1995 and 2000,
and holds no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars. Last year it
made $2.6bn (£1.3bn) in profits from revenues of $22.6bn.

But Halliburton also comes with plenty of controversy and the company
has been at the centre of numerous inquiries over alleged accounting
malpractice, suspicious payments to officials and overcharging. It has
been accused of breaching US sanctions that prohibit companies from
operating in places such as Iran and was also blamed for damaging the
historic Iraqi site of Babylon, where it helped establish a US base.
Currently the company is being investigated by the Justice Department
and the Securities and Exchange Commission over allegations of
improper dealings in Kuwait, Nigeria and Iraq. And this week the
company fuelled even more controversy when it announced that it was
moving its chief executive and its corporate headquarters from
Houston, Texas, to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. It has insisted
that it would remain incorporated in the US - actually in the state of
Delaware - and that its move would not affect its tax position. It
also emphasised that it would retain a corporate office in Houston
from where most of its executives would continue to operate.

But news of the proposed move, announced at the weekend, has brought
an immediate and bitter backlash. A number of senior Democrats have
accused the company of nothing less than a blatant attempt to avoid
both paying US taxes and the heat of the ongoing federal
investigations into its business operations. How could a company that
had benefited from so many government contracts, they asked, simply up
and leave? There were vows that Congress would launch new
investigations.

The outrage was led by no one less than Senator Hillary Clinton, one
of the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination for president.
"I think it's disgraceful that American companies are more than happy
to try and get no-bid contracts, like Halliburton has, and then turn
around and say 'But you know, we're not going to stay with our chief
executive officer, the president of our company, in the United States
any more'," she said at a press conference in New York.

"Does this mean they're going to quit paying taxes in America? Is this
going to affect the investigations that are going on? Because we have
a lot of evidence about their misuse of government contracts and how
they have cheated the American soldier, cheated the American taxpayer.
They have taken money and not provided the services."

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont said the move was "an
example of corporate greed at its worst". He added: "This is an insult
to the US soldiers and taxpayers who paid the tab for their no-bid
contracts and endured their overcharges all these years. At the same
time that they're avoiding US taxes, I'm sure they won't stop
insisting on taking their profits in cold, hard US cash."

Halliburton dismisses the criticisms. Announcing the company's
decision at a regional energy conference in Bahrain, the company's
president, chairman and CEO, Dave Lesar, said the move reflected the
growing importance of the Middle East and the Asian energy markets.
Last year more than 38 per cent of Halliburton's $13bn oil field
services revenue came from the eastern hemisphere.

"As we invest more heavily in our eastern hemisphere presence, we will
continue to build upon our leading position in the North American gas-
focused market through our excellent mix of technology, reservoir
knowledge and an experienced workforce," he said. "The eastern
hemisphere is a market that is more heavily weighted toward oil
exploration and production opportunities and growing our business here
will bring more balance to Halliburton's overall portfolio." The
company also insists that it will gain no tax advantage from the move,
as it will remain legally incorporated in the US.

In a statement to The Independent, a company spokeswoman, Melissa
Norcross, said: "These assumptions and suppositions are absolutely
untrue and unfounded. Halliburton is, and will remain, a US
corporation, incorporated in Delaware, with its principal executive
office in Houston, Texas. As such, we anticipate absolutely no tax
benefits from this decision."

Halliburton, which is in the process of spinning off its KBR arm, has
long enjoyed a close relationship with the Bush administration, and
indeed, with previous US governments. It has most recently been in the
public eye for its contracts in Iraq - the Logcap (or Logistics
Civilian Augmentation Program) under which it provides military
support services such as meals, laundry and fuel supplies and the
Restore Iraqi Oil (RIO) contract. Reports say the estimated value of
the contracts stands at more than $25bn. A number of its contracts
were awarded on a no-bid basis - which drew criticism not just from
watchdogs but from other companies seeking their share of the spoils
of the so-called Iraqi "reconstruction" projects.

Industry observers say Halliburton enjoys a near unique position
within the US corporate world. "People always look at *** Cheney and
say he is the poster-boy of cronyism but at a bureaucratic level there
has also been a lot of revolving doors from the Army Corps of
Engineers to Halliburton or else consultants to Halliburton," said
Charlie Cray of HalliburtonWatch.Org, a project of the Center for
Corporate Policy, a non-profit group based in Washington. He added:
"Given the multiple ongoing investigations into Halliburton's alleged
wrongdoing, policy-makers should closely scrutinise Halliburton's
latest move, and whether it will allow the company to further elude
accountability. Moreover, this underscores the need for Congress to
bar companies that have broken the law, or avoided paying taxes, from
receiving federal contracts."

Pratap Chaterjee, director of CorpWatch, another watchdog
organisation, agreed that Halliburton's position was remarkable. But
he said the company was not simply close to the Bush administration -
to which it has been a sizeable political donor - but that it had
enjoyed a relationship with previous US administrations. He pointed
out that KBR's predecessor, Brown and Root, had operated in Vietnam
and had faced similar accusations of over-charging and corruption as
well as allegations that it was too close to President Lyndon Johnson.
Indeed, a young Illinois congressman called Donald Rumsfeld travelled
to Vietnam to investigate such allegations. Brown and Root also won
contracts from President Bill Clinton for work in the Balkans. Long
before that, Erle Halliburton, who died in 1957, had loaned his yacht
to the US military during the Second World War.

"They are somewhat unique in that their former CEO is now the Vice-
President," said Mr Chaterjee. "They are somewhat unique in that they
have a long relationship with US governments. It's not limited to the
Bush administration." Mr Chaterjee, along with some industry analysts,
believes the move to Dubai could make sense from a business point of
view alone. "There's not much oil in Texas any more," Dalton Garis, a
US energy economist at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, told the
Associated Press. "Halliburton is in the oil and gas industry and
guess what? Sixty per cent of the world's oil and gas is right here.
If they didn't move now, they'd have to do it later."

Yet others have pointed out that even if the company remains
incorporated in the US and eligible to pay some US taxes there are
likely to be financial benefits of moving to Dubai, a boom city, whose
tax-free zones have lured around a quarter of the Fortune 500 top
companies to establish corporate headquarters there. Sarah Anderson of
the Institute for Policy Studies, said: "With today's technologies,
there's no real reason to have to physically relocate. Those that have
are trying to evade US oversight and tax authorities. And Dubai is a
tax-free haven - no corporate or employee taxes. Halliburton claims
this is not a big deal, but I can't imagine Lesar will be working over
there alone in a little cubicle. This will be a much-expanded
operation in Dubai." She added: "Despite the billions in US government
contracts Halliburton has received, it has no loyalty or sense of
obligation to US troops or taxpayers. I find it ironic that Lesar is
going to the same place as one of the only other individuals who's
received even more bad publicity in recent years - Michael Jackson."

The controversy is not going to go away any time soon. Congressman
Henry Waxman, the Democrat who heads the House Oversight and
Government Reform Committee, is poised to announce that he will hold
an inquiry into the proposed move.

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