An offshoot of Halliburton Co., Kellogg, Brown & Root LLC, Wednesday pleaded guilty to charges of bribing some Nigerian officials and politicians to corner the contract for the building of the $6 billion Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas plant on Bonny Island.Court papers filed in Houston, in the United States, showed that KBR pleaded guilty to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for promising and paying $180 million dollars in bribes to officials in Nigeria, in exchange for engineering and construction contracts between 1995 and 2004.
An offshoot of Halliburton Co., Kellogg, Brown & Root LLC, Wednesday pleaded guilty to charges of bribing some Nigerian officials and politicians to corner the contract for the building of the $6 billion Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas plant on Bonny Island.
Court papers filed in Houston, in the United States, showed that KBR pleaded guilty to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for promising and paying $180 million dollars in bribes to officials in Nigeria, in exchange for engineering and construction contracts between 1995 and 2004.
The corrupt payments were made to the Nigerian government officers and political party officials through various international consultants.
The indictment was inspired by criminal information filed by the United States Department of Justice in a federal court. Such filing is often used as part of a plea deal. KBR, a major engineering and construction services company with operations around the world, was severed as a separate public company from Halliburton in 2007.
This plea follows in tow of a guilty plea last September by its former CEO, Albert "Jack" Stanley. Stanley, a direct pick of the former US Vice president, Dick Cheney, to head KBR, also pleaded guilty to a separate count of conspiring to defraud KBR and others, in a deal through which he admitted receiving $10.8 million in kickbacks from a consultant hired by the company at his behest.
While the court has ordered KBR to pay a little over $400 million in fines and will closely supervise the company's activities for the next three years, Stanley's sentencing will come up on 6 May 2009.
U. S. District Judge Keith Ellison presided over the plea deal agreement. KBR General Counsel, Andrew Farley, represented the consortium in court.
TSKJ, the consortium under which Halliburton built the LNG plant, had in March 1995 hired a London lawyer, Jefferey Tesler, presumably to pass bribes to Nigerian officials. The lawyer's brief was to do everything possible, including bribing relevant officials, to ensure that TSKJ got the construction contract.
$40 million was reportedly earmarked for passage to late dictator, Gen Sani Abacha, alone through Mr. Tesler's firm Tri-Star, based in Gibralter, Spain. Tesler's firm was to receive $60 million for the assignment.
A French magistrate had also described the lawyer's transfer of $2.5 million into a Swiss bank account held by former petroleum minister, Dan Etete, under a false name.
Mr. Tesler confessed the payment but claimed that the money was for an investment in offshore oil exploration leases in Nigeria and that he was not aware the accounts belonged to Mr. Etete.
An investigative report of the House of Representatives Committee on Public Petition also indicated that a former Inspector General of Police, M.D. Yusufu, acted inappropriately during the process of awarding the contract to TSKJ.
BCSA, which also bided for the job, had complained to the then Petroleum Minister, Don Etiebet, that Shell Gas B.V, the technical advisor, had colluded with TSKJ on pricing information.
In response to the complaint, Mr. Etiebet rescheduled a meeting of the NLNG board fixed for 24 September, 1994, at which the TSKJ bid was to be approved. But Mr. Yusufu, who was the chairman of the NLNG board at the time, wrote a letter saying he would not reschedule the meeting.
The House Committee report interpreted this to mean that "a decision had been taken even before the board meeting of 24 September 1994." Investigators believe that Tesler induced Yusuf to back TSKJ's bid.
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