So What if Jack Stanley Was Getting Kickbacks? Was he simply following Cheney's established procedures?

As I mentioned below, according to French investigators reported in the WSJ, Cheney's successor as CEO at Haliburton's Root, Brown and Kellogg division apparently took a $5M payment, deposited into a Swiss bank account under his control, in connection with a $1.7B contract to expand a natural gas complex in Nigeria. The press reports aren't clear about who made the payment, and they are definitely not clear as to why. What is clear, is that the payments were made not for efforts begun by Jack Stanley, but for efforts begun by Dick Cheney.

The expansion is referred to as "Trains 4 and 5" -- contracts awarded in March 2002 by the NNLG collaboration (the Nigerian gov't, plus Agip, Royal Dutch/Shell, and French company ELF). Stanley was CEO when that contract was awarded. However, these are just add-ons to existing contracts, which were won by Cheney during his 1995-2000 tenure as CEO.

The first development contracts were awarded to Halliburton/RBK under Cheney's watch -- as described in the 2002 Haliburton press release . Trains 1 and 2 were awarded to Halliburton/RBK (as one of four companies in a collaboration referred to as TSKJ) in December 1995, while Cheney was CEO; Train 3 was awarded in March 1999, while Cheney was CEO. These facilities were worth $3.8B, a somewhat larger award than the $1.7B for trains 4 and 5.

So, one is compelled to ask: why is Cheney's successor getting $5M payments into a personal swiss bank account? who was paying him? and -- most importantly, since this involves our Vice President --- did the payment happen because of demands by Stanley, or were they made as continuing practice established by Cheney, who won the initial contracts for Halliburton? Update at 8:43 EST CNN is reporting details of the payment. It was one of many payments, discovered in investigating $180M payments by the TSKJ consortium to a Gibralter company "Tristar", which apparently only has one person associated with it -- a British lawyer named Jeffrey Tesler. Some of the $180M payments made by the TSKJ consortium to Tristar, instead went to to Swiss accounts controlled by Stanley, former Nigerian oil minister Dan Etete and William Chaudan, a director of a Madeira-based unit of the consortium.

The payments were made between 1995-2002 -- that is, they happened while Cheney was CEO at Halliburton's KBR.