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Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Global Oil Industry (theage.com.au)
Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker, Michael Bachelard, and Daniel Quinlan report on a widespread corruption in the global oil industry for The Huffington Post: In the list of the world's great companies, Unaoil is nowhere to be seen. But for the best part of the past two decades, the family business from Monaco has systematically corrupted the global oil industry, distributing many millions of dollars worth of bribes on behalf of corporate behemoths including Samsung, Rolls-Royce, Halliburton and Australia's own Leighton Holdings. A massive leak of confidential documents has for the first time exposed the true extent of corruption within the oil industry, implicating dozens of leading companies, bureaucrats and politicians in a sophisticated global web of bribery and graft. After a six-month investigation across two continents, Fairfax Media and The Huffington Post can reveal that billions of dollars of government contracts were awarded as the direct result of bribes paid on behalf of firms including British icon Rolls-Royce, US giant Halliburton, Australia's Leighton Holdings and Korean heavyweights Samsung and Hyundai.
Big oil is corrupt?! I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you!
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Some citations (other than Huff Post):
http://www.smh.com.au/interact...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
http://www.stuff.co.nz/busines...
http://www.stuff.co.nz/busines...
http://www.stuff.co.nz/busines...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If any of this stuff is true, then obviously it makes extracting oil and selling it more expensive. In turn, that makes the price of gas higher than it should be and encourages people to reduce their carbon footprints.
Consequently, only an anti-science climate denier could possibly have any problem with any of this.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
my Captain Obvious.
As usual.
The headline should read Widespread Corruption in Humans.
Find me one group of powerful people, be it ANY industry, ANY government, ALL of academia, ALL banking/financial, whatever sector you want to pick, one place where multiple people have stood to gain through backroom deals and collusion where is hasn't/doesn't consistently happen.
Humans work to benefit their own ends, Film at 11.
It looks like the company (Unaoil) is acting as a "bribery go-between," when oil companies want to drill in oil-rich countries, they contract out the necessary bribery to Unaoil.
Is it really necessary to bribe officials in oil-rich countries?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Teapot Dome
What are bribes really?
I propose a definition: They are various sorts of financial transactions that society lacks the concrete mechanism to define.
They are supported and accepted by society as a whole, especially by those high in the hierarchy.
But why is the concrete mechanism of definition lacking?
Is there a lack of academic resources to create such a mechanism in accordance with the other mechanisms of financial transaction?
No, it is not the cost of the academic resources that is prohibitive, it is the cost of having such a mechanism in the open.
Take this opportunity to soak in the fact that the economy is completely fixed. Bribes are a sign of information that is vital to economic function being withheld from the public.
Presently there is no opportunity for hard work, creativity, and vision to pay off in a lasting way on their own. There is no freedom in this world without united awareness of this fact of the current circumstances.
But there used to be, and there could be.
Now scoff at this, forget about it, and go back to your labor, slave.
We are all human. Everyone has flaws. The more money and power you wield, the larger and wider the effects of your actions.
Yeah-- I though about whether to not include them, but figured there was a benefit in the parallax of sources, even if the Daily Mail is about as reliable as the National Enquirer.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
its a cartel, and even wikipedia knows it.
...US giant Halliburton...
Not surprised. Dick Cheney was behind W pulling the strings and starting wars. Even shot a "friend" in the face!
Who could have guessed?
I'm not surprised at all. To play in most Middle East countries requires a local company and a physical office. This can be hard to set up for foreigners due to local law. Certain countries basically require kickbacks and bribes to get anything done. Legitimate companies often get around both of these issues by partnering with a "facilitator" company.
The Facilitator company will sometimes act as the agent (sales representative) for the legitimate company, collecting a commission on goods and services sold. The commission may be deliberately higher than normal in order to have the cash to pay whoever needs to be paid. This can be discovered by examining the commission amount/percentage and comparing it to other parts of the world for similar services. The foreign company can be held responsible if it knew, or should have known, that something fishy was going on.
Another way to do the same thing is to retain such a company for consulting services. Looking at contract deliverables and the contract amount usually gives an indication if the consulting services are legitimate or a cover for something else. Again, the foreign company can be held responsible if they knew, or should have known that something was up.
Yet another way to do the same thing is to subcontract to one of these facilitating companies. The facilitating company then marks up the price to whatever they need in order to pay their sales staff, pay bribes, or negotiate legal hurdles. The customer's contract is between the customer and the facilitating company, and the foreign company never sees it. Done right, the foreign company has no idea what the final customer price is, or if it was reasonable, etc. This is the best way to protect a foreign company since any improper or illegal actions that the facilitating company takes fall solely on the facilitating company. The facilitating company can also accept contract provisions that a foreign company could not legally accept (Israeli goods boycott, as an example). The foreign company never has the information required to see that something was amiss, so proving that they "knew or should have known" is substantially harder.
One last thing to keep in mind is that certain types of payments are actually legal. Generally, you can pay someone to "hurry up" and complete something that is included in their official duties, and which they would have done for you anyway without the payment. If the payment is just to expedite something that would have happened anyway, it is not considered a bribe, even if it is paid directly to an individual. The prime example of this is paying a customs officer to release cargo which has all the correct paperwork. The officer would have done this anyway, eventually. The payment is just to expedite the legal and inevitable action.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Global Oil Industry
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Government
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Major Corporation
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Academic Research
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Some Church
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Scientific Community
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in HOA
Leaked Emails Reveal Widespread Corruption in Any Human Organization
You do know, don't you, that the Koch Brothers have spent millions trying to bring down Trump.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
I'm not sure if I'll be able to concentrate after being THIS gobsmacked...
Fuck. This is like saying "Water is wet." or "Fire is hot." or "Politicians are full of shit."
It's pretty much a given. Like gravity.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Just Imagine what is going on with US Tax dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan - the exact same thing. Notice the same Halliburton? Remember the no bid contracts the enriched Cheney and CO and still continue today?
This type of bribery is rampant in the US government, which is intimately tied to the US Oil industry through revolving door jobs, think tanks, and the constant back and forth between Public service and For-profit Oil industry.
Since everyone is bought out and implicated, no one is ever charged with taking or accepting bribes.
So the articles are very light on details so I could have this very wrong but it appears it's the various governments that want the companies to pay them something to do business in their countries? Not sure that really equates to big oil corruption but like I said the article, as per HuffPo standard, is kind of light on details but I might have missed something.
It all starts at 0
“The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,”
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Shhh, you're going against the lefty playbook of the vast rightwing conspiracy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seriously, we have known this since at least the 60's. So better late then never?...I guess
Support your local school shooter, give them your firearms.
Ben Ghazi.
Darn, and in the US, we can't even deduct those bribes!
Was this industrial espionage or state espionage that leaked it? Or a disgruntled employee?
We've had a few seemingly random leaks of criminal conspiracies since NSA spying got big... information you couldn't use in court if it came directly from a government action.
because they're JOB CREATORS!
Yes, I am quite aware that the koch bros feel that Trump has taken their toys and are mad that he is playing with them
This lefty is really enjoying watching the gopers rip apart their own entrails, just because the vast right-wing conspiracy is falling down around their feet in now way means that it does not exist
silly gopers
Use this pattern for negotiation, uh, death squads.
Blackwater and Xe are just for security.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who at the time referenced in the leaked documents was CEO of Halliburton. Oh, he is also a war criminal.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
My late relative used to work for Tidewater for 45 years. He developed the actual oil recovery methods prevalent amongst the industry today used over 90% of the earth. To his credit, he was the scientist that developed the oil-eating bacteria. He had several patents that he was taken to court over... for nearly 20 YEARS for the sole purpose of robbing him of them. He was in court so long that the patents in question then expired, taking away the ability to collect royalties on them and the companies involved developed patents eerily similar to his to bypass him .
After all said and done, the judge determined the lawyers were so corrupt / bribed, he had the lit of them disbarred and banned for life from pracicing law.
My relative wanted only $1 per barrrl for royalties. He would of been the world's 1st Trillionair :(
To say the industry is corrupt based only this email release, is a staggeringly small drop in the bucket of the scale of how much evdence is really there and already available, just that jyst about every media organization government controlling oil rights is blatently ignoring the writing on the wall. Just be glad this story wasn't silenced
Can I haz 35 y/o hookers?
There's no substitute for experience, I'm tellin ya. :)
What if everybody had the attitude of "well, this is a screwed-up world we live in, what can you do, (nothing), let's turn to the sports" about everything?
"King George wants us to suffer taxation without representation, surprise, surprise, well, duh." - there'd be no America.
"Big deal, this stuff happens, no need for major efforts to change" was the attitude of all those Bishops and Cardinals to kids getting buggered.
We SHOULD react with shock and disgust to lying and fraud in the financial industry, to corruption in oil, to military vendors promoting war; we should tell our politicians they're unemployed unless they act and can have all the money they need to sic 10,000 FBI agents on them.
The S&L crisis in the 80's prompted the assignment of 1000 FBI agents to the case. They brought in about one conviction each: 1000 convictions, a 90% success rate, after winnowing down 30,000 referrals to 1100-odd trials. It brought about real results.
By contrast, the 2008 crisis prompted no such effort despite being 70X as large a set of frauds.
We can tackle these large problems; you just put out the same effort you'd put into a new highway interchange or skyscraper: $100M budget per year and a few thousand people working on it. The US Justice System has nearly one million employees; only 2300 on white-collar crime.
http://gawker.com/this-is-how-...
Can anybody point to a download site for the emails?
...robbing my computer of CPU cycles!
When competing against companies that do pay bribes you have to at least match them or you won't get the business (a principled stand will kill your industry). Large chinese corporates actual do training on how to do bribery and prostitution as sales tools (I have friends with first hand experience) - it is part of their culture. So Sinopec (possibly with active govt help) won't be so constrained in making deals in 3rd world. Western law should stop hamstringing western companies.
There are only two US oil companies. They control less than 10% of the global oil market. They are the only private oil companies in the world. All the rest of the oil companies on the planet - and all the ones mentioned in this report - are state-owned, essentially socialist, enterprises. This isn't the "corruption of Big Oil", this is the corruption of crony-capitalist, government interference in the market.
I can't get to excited over this. There are a whole lot of countries in the world in which bribing public officials is expected, and if you don't you'll never do business there.
> vast right-wing conspiracy
that includes a large part of ther dems too.
If there was representation, government would be 1/10 the size it is today, measured in both reveune and power over the people. That's because under representation, there couldn't be a continuous, unstoppable expansion of government power. You don't really believe that the majority actually wants government to expand indefinitely, do you?
Ford F-Series of course. Burn more oil !
Did you forget when Fox went to court to protect their "right" to lie in the Fox Network news?
Trump is economically liberal (big business crony-capitalist) and socially conservative. The Koch Brothers have been promoting more Libertarian view points. This may all fall under the Big Tent view of Republicans but they are not the same.
The Democrats have similar problems. They used to be the party of labor. They are no longer. Witness the Keystone Pipeline debates. A lot of labor which had previously supported the Democrats are now voting for Trump.
Trump is a populist. Weird but there it is. A billionaire NYC real estate developer acts like a populist and get support because of his populist rhetoric.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Our — the taxpayers' — investment in Tesla was even worse than the Solyndra fiasco.
VCs invest their own money — and they can not lose more than earn for very long. Government invests — and loses — ours and can keep on losing forever, because it can compel us to keep giving it more.
Capitalism works, Socialism does not — if you accept the 100 years of failure, from Lenin's USSR to Chavez's Venezuela, as any guide.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sounds like federal politicians to me. The entire system is corrupt and our gov't is an oligarchy.
*SIGH*
Trump will :-) Some people disagree with him (and you), but he'll tell them nonetheless.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Everybody talks about "wealthiest man on earth" and mentions Gates, etc. There are 83 persons on the world that own half the globe's assets. But they never talk about the wealthiest family, like this one, owning this company. If a single man like Gates can build a $70 billion fortune in a life time, what can a dynasty build over centuries? Which is the wealthiest family today? Google it, and be surprised.
30 years in the game and I'm not in the least astonished.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
A leak from an oil company, that turns out to be documents? Thank the Lord.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
The Huffington Post has a new slogan: More professional than "Rolling Stone".
OK, OK. I'll read the article.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Sounds like the app trend of micropayments.... Sure you can play for free, but to build that refinery, it will take 24h to complete, OR you could pay 2.99 for 25 gems which you can then use to complete that refinery right now! However if you want to be competitive at all, you pretty much *have* to make the payments, or not bother playing the game at all...