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Contributions from
the Column
Facts and trends
Reconstruction in Iraq: windfalls from war
Trade alone does not deliver development
Concern over independence of EU humanitarian aid
Debt relief for Iraq?
UN adopts convention to fight corruption
Security situation in Afghanistan fragile
German-Indonesian cooperation
Bribery in Nigeria’s oil business
Interview with Hans-Joachim Preuss: “The Kunduz operation will not bring more security”
12/2003
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[ US government and companies under fire ]
Reconstruction in Iraq: windfalls from war
While violence in Iraq is escalating and foreign soldiers, aid workers and Iraqi civilians must fear for their lives every day, US companies are doing great business amid all the misery. Reports are mounting that companies which supported George W. Bush in the last US presidential election campaign have done best in cornering lucrative contracts for reconstruction projects in Iraq. And, says a study by the Washington Center for Public Integrity, companies that have close personal connections to the US government have done best of all. They include the Halliburton concern, which until Bush’s election in the autumn of 2000 was headed by Dick Cheney, now Vice President. The study adds that as a rule calls for tenders were not made, which the government justifies by saying that would have taken too much time. Commenting on this practice in its November issue, the US magazine Harper’s described it as ‘state socialism’.
There are also increasing indications that criteria such as transparency and good governance are not strictly observed not only in the government’s allocation of contracts, but also in the companies’ implementation of them. According to Alert Net, a Reuters Foundation information service, Democrat Congressmen Henry Waxman and John Dingell accuse the Halliburton company of having wasted money for reconstruction on a grand scale. Halliburton, they say, bought petrol in Kuwait at exorbitant prices and then resold it in Iraq at a great loss. The US-sponsored Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) too met with criticism when the organisation Christian Aid issued a critical report at the end of October which said the CPA had no records of the whereabouts of US$ 4 billion revenue from oil sales. According to Harper’s, the US companies in Iraq that have come under suspicion have since joined in a self-styled so-called ‘International Peace Operations Association’.
The US administration and the CPA have in the meantime reacted to the criticism. For the first time, non-American companies are to be allowed to bid for new building contracts worth a total of US$ 15 billion. The Wall Street Journal said the projects were to be supervised by a new body in the US Defence Department. For its part, the CPA rejected the accusation that it could not provide proof of its spending, and posted its budget on the Internet. However, the details provided are opaque even for well-informed observers. “You’d get more information on a bank statement,” commented a representative of Christian Aid, according to Alert Net. (ell)
Further information:
www.publicintegrity.org/wow/ and www.cpa-iraq.org
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