(That's Million with an "M" not a "B." Gosh, won't this hurt Halliburton?)
Mon Jan 30, 2006 07:30 PM ET
By Irwin Arieff
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Halliburton Co. subsidiary KBR has agreed to lop $9 million off sole-source contracts paid for by the U.S. government with Iraqi oil money after auditors questioned $208 million in possible overcharges, an international watchdog agency said on Monday.
The International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB), which had urged the U.S. government to reimburse Iraq for any charges that could not be justified, now hopes to independently review the deal to ensure it was fair, the IAMB said in a statement posted on its Web site <
http://www.iamb.info>.
The board, which said it only recently learned of the December 22, 2005, settlement between the Pentagon and KBR, also hopes to review other sole-source contracts the United States awarded Halliburton while administering Iraq after its 2003 invasion.
The independent review would aim to "determine whether excess costs were incurred that would be the subject of renegotiation," it said. The contracts were part of $1.4 billion in pacts awarded to KBR on a noncompetitive basis to procure supplies of fuel while Washington administered Iraq. Halliburton was led by Dick Cheney before he became vice president.
Rather than pay Iraq the $9 million, the Pentagon chose to take that much off the amount the United States owed KBR for other work in Iraq, an IAMB board member said. "It appears to us that this amount is relatively small," said Bert Keuppens, the IMF representative on the IAMB, referring to the $9 million settlement.
(more at link below)
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http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=11028550&src=rss/domesticNews>