War & Disaster Profiteering

High-ranking officials from the United States as well as Iraq accuse the Danish shipping company Maersk of having taken advantage of the chaos of war in order to grab control of Iraq's oil port. Read More

Reports say many went with fake certificates while others complain the work was too hard so they could not fit in the work plan of the company that took them to Iraq. Read More

"Tens of millions of dollars in cash had gone in and out of the South-Central Region vault without any tracking of who deposited or withdrew the money, and why it was taken out," says a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which is in the midst of a series of audits for the Pentagon and State Department. Read More

After considering a sale, Halliburton Co. said yesterday that it plans to spin off a minority stake in its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root Inc., the largest American contractor in Iraq. "We believe the IPO market in general and the public market for engineering and construction companies in particular is very attractive," David J. Lesar, Halliburton's chairman, president and chief executive, said in a conference call with analysts. Read More

After securing contracts with the Iraqi government potentially worth hundreds of millions, someone killed Dale Stoffel. Read More

Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), who sits on the pivotal appropriations committee which oversees all major spending bills, compared fraud in Louisiana to fraud in Iraq. Read More

Citing a recent exposed case of over 40 youths stranded in Kuwait and Iraq without valid documents as "bonded labourers," the victims are said to have been penalised by the Kuwait police while hiding from them with no regular or valid documents. Read More

The American-financed reconstruction program in Iraq will not complete scores of promised projects to help rebuild the country, a federal oversight agency reported. Read More

After three years of losing money, Halliburton reported a hefty profit for 2005 and announced that all six of its divisions posted record results. Read More

Auditors who have discovered Iraq's deepening financial crisis have been ignored. They asked the US ambassador and the US military commander in Iraq for their views. Neither replied. The US State Department was to submit estimates of how much it will cost to complete all American-funded projects in Iraq to the White House Office of Management and Budget. The Office won't discuss the matter. Earlier this month, Brigadier-General William McCoy told reporters: 'The US never intended to completely rebuild Iraq . . . This was just supposed to be a jump-start.' Read More