Say Anything Blog

Halliburton and its former subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, have been engaged in talks with federal prosecutors and securities regulators to settle a long-running probe into claims the company bribed Nigerian officials to win a $5 billion construction contract for a natural gas liquefaction plant while Vice President Dick Cheney headed the corporation, according to Halliburton’s latest quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"From time to time, we and KBR have engaged in discussions with the SEC and the DOJ regarding a settlement of these matters,” Halliburton disclosed in a July 25 SEC filing.

A Halliburton spokeswoman would not elaborate on the nature of the discussions with the government.

Halliburton disclosed in a footnote in its quarterly filing with the SEC in May that the Justice Department “has evidence of payments to Nigerian officials by another agent in connection with a separate KBR-managed project in Nigeria called the Shell EA project.”

The footnote’s reference to Shell was the first time the petroleum giant was linked to the bribery suspicions. Representatives from Shell and Halliburton did not return repeated calls or e-mails for comment.

Last year, oil field services company Baker Hughes Inc. paid $44.1 million and agreed to hire an outside monitor to oversee its compliance activities to settle claims related to a federal bribery probe of its operations in Nigeria, Angola and Kazakhstan.

In May, Halliburton warned investors that federal prosecutors have obtained evidence that Halliburton officials bribed Nigerian officials to secure the Bonny Island natural gas liquefaction plant contract in violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The bribes allegedly went to the notoriously corrupt Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and some of his subordinates.