Halliburton to move Headquarters to Dubai

Posted on Mar 15, 2007 4:16pm PDT - Contact the poster -

http://base.google.com/base/search?authorid=1314161&hl=en&gl=US -

News Source:

Urban Insurance Blog
Publish Date:

Mar 15, 2007

Description

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007
Halliburton, which was led by Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995-2000, has announced plans to move it’s headquarters to the United Arab Emirates. Halliburton officials skipped some of the corporate courtesies that would usually attend such an announcement, failing to notify Houston Mayor Bill White and other community leaders in advance.

“My office will be in Dubai, and I will run our entire worldwide operations from that office,” Chief Executive David Lesar said at an energy conference in Bahrain on Sunday. “Dubai is a great business center.” As a purely business decision, it seems logical to move your headquarters to a location where many of the deals for your industry are being done. But Halliburton is not just another company. They are a corporation that got rich on US. Government contracts, with close ties to this administration. Halliburton is the Pentagon’s largest private contractor operating in Iraq. Under a logistics contract with the Army valued at more than $25 billion, KBR serves up meals, builds bases and provides other support services for U.S. troops. Prescott Bush was a director of Dresser Industries, which is now part of Halliburton. Former United States president George H. W. Bush worked for Dresser Industries in several positions from 1948-1951, before he founded Zapata Corporation.A list of some of the recent contracts awarded to Halliburton include:1. A $100 million contract in 2002 to build a new U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan 2. 15 LOGCAP task orders worth more than $216 million for work under Operation Enduring Freedom3. A $200 million contract to provide housing for 100,000 soldiers in Iraq.4. $28.2 million to build prisoner-of-war camps.5. $40.8 million to house the Iraqi Survey Group, which was deployed to find weapons of mass destruction.6. KBR division of Halliburton has been paid for $1.6 billion for work in Iraq alone. Much of that on a “No Bid” basis . This makes Halliburton, one of the nations largest defense contractors.
UAE New home of Halliburton“This is an insult to the U.S. soldiers and taxpayers who paid the tab for their no-bid contracts and endured their overcharges for all these years,” said judiciary committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. “This is a surprising development,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said in a statement Sunday. “I want to understand the ramifications for the U.S. taxpayer and national security.” The question is does a company have an obbligation to stay in the US while it is receiving billions of dollars/ year in contracts from American’s pockets? And will moving to the United Arab Emirates free them from paying taxes in the US?

Larry Lubell Urban Insurance Blog