- WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- U.S.
Vice President Dick Cheney, a former CEO of Halliburton Co., has received
hundreds of thousands of dollars from the company since taking office while
asserting he has no financial interest in the company, Senate Democrats
said Tuesday.
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- The Democrats demanded to know why Cheney claimed to
have cut ties with the oil services company, involved in a large no-bid
contract for oil reconstruction work in Iraq, when he was still receiving
large deferred salary payments.
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- Senate Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle of South Dakota
and New Jersey Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg said the revelations reinforced
the need for hearings about the no-bid contracts Halliburton received from
the Bush administration.
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- "The vice president needs to explain how he reconciles
the claim that he has 'no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind,'
with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred salary payments he
receives from Halliburton," Daschle said in a statement.
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- On NBC's Meet the Press program last Sunday, Cheney,
who was Halliburton's CEO from 1995 to 2000, said he had severed all ties
with the Houston-based company.
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- "I have no financial interest in Halliburton of
any kind and haven't had now for over three years," he said.
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- Cathie Martin, a Cheney spokeswoman, confirmed that the
vice president has been receiving the deferred compensation payments from
Halliburton, but she disputed that his statements on Meet the Press had
been misleading.
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- Cheney had already earned the salary that was now being
paid, Martin said, adding that once he became a nominee for vice president,
he purchased an insurance policy to guarantee that the deferred salary
would be paid to him whether or not Halliburton survived as a company.
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- "So he has no financial interest in the company,"
she said.
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- But Sen. Lautenberg said that Cheney's financial disclosure
filings with the Office of Government Ethics listed $205,298 in deferred
salary payments made to him by Halliburton in 2001 and another $162,393
in 2002. The filings indicated that he was scheduled to receive more payments
in 2003, 2004, and 2005.
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- "In 2001 and 2002, Vice President Cheney was paid
almost as much in salary from Halliburton as he made as vice president,"
Lautenberg said. The U.S. vice president's salary is $198,600 annually.
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- The financial disclosure forms also said that Cheney
continued to hold 433,333 unexercised Halliburton stock options, with exercise
prices below the company's current stock market price. Cheney's spokeswoman
said he had placed these options in a charitable trust and no longer had
control over them.
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- On Meet the Press, Cheney also said he had no involvement
in the awarding of government contracts to Halliburton.
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- "As vice president, I have absolutely no influence
of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape, or form of contracts
led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government,"
he said.
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- In March, Halliburton was granted, without competition,
a contract by the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) to repair and restore Iraq's
oil fields. ACE says the cost of this contract to taxpayers is about $1
billion.
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- But under a second military support contract, Halliburton's
Kellogg Brown & Root unit has racked up more than $1 billion in expenses
in Iraq, according to the U.S. Army Field Support Command.
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- Copyright © 2003 Environmental News Network Inc.
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