Search
The Army Corps has set aside as much as $1.47 billion for explosives-demolition contracts with 10 private companies. Neither Zapata Engineering nor the Army Corps of Engineers would reveal exact salaries, but the first one-year contract the company received in September 2003 totaled $3.8 million for five management positions in Iraq.
Former associates say Ryan Manelick had told Army investigators looking into a fellow contractor's disappearance that large sums of money were being paid in kickbacks to a U.S. Army officer in Iraq in return for doling out lucrative contracts. Two months later Ryan Manelick was shot dead.
U.S. officials in postwar Iraq paid a contractor by stuffing $2 million worth of crisp bills into his gunnysack and routinely made cash payments around Baghdad from a pickup truck, a former official with the U.S. occupation government says.
Republican senators who have mauled the United Nations in its handling Iraqi oil revenues went strangely quiet over the news that the Coalition Provisional Authority saw $8.8 billion go absent without leave in just 14 months. It is 55,000 times as much as Mr Sevan is alleged to have been paid.
The difference between Kroll and DynCorps, two private security companies is night and day. Kroll was like commuting to the office. We generally obeyed simple traffic laws. A trip with DynCorps is the proverbial "E-ticket" ride.
In a little-noticed shift, for-profit outfits have replaced the Pentagon as the chief trainers of the country's fledging police force. Just over 700 contractors -- more than previously disclosed -- are now training more than half the Iraqi Police Service.
"Private soldiers" have been operating in a legal limbo, with precious few rules governing their activities. However, a handful of legal cases in the U.S. are beginning to define the legal boundaries under which these companies can operate.
O Globo newspaper says that more than 500 Brazilians have been hired as mercenaries to watch US military facilities in Iraq and the Brazilian Labor Ministry will investigate whether there were irregularities or not in the employment of Brazilians.
The Balkans Web site has articles and commentary by about 50 journalists who are said to have be paid by European Command through a private contractor, Anteon Corp., an information technology company based in Fairfax.
The U.S. Army has decided not to withold payment on disputed bills involving billions of dollars for Iraq contract work after Halliburton threatened that delays in payment could lead to an interruption of crucial support services to the U.S. military.
The Coalition Provisional Authority may have paid salaries for thousands of nonexistent employees in Iraqi ministries, issued unauthorized multimillion-dollar contracts and provided little oversight of spending in possibly corrupt ministries, according to the report by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.
The U.S.-led authority that governed Iraq after the 2003 invasion did not properly safeguard $8.8 billion of Iraq's own money and this lack of oversight opened up these funds to corruption, said a U.S. audit.
At least 232 civilians have been killed while working on U.S.-funded contracts in Iraq and the death toll is rising rapidly, according to a U.S. government audit sent to Congress. n addition, 728 claims were filed for employees who missed more than four days of work. Several hundred more were reported from neighboring Kuwait where companies working in Iraq have logistics and support operations.
Halliburton Co., the world's second- biggest oilfield services company, became the sixth-largest U.S. military contractor last year on the strength of its work to help rebuild Iraq and care for U.S. troops, the Pentagon said.
Riggs Bank pleaded guilty to helping former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and the leaders of oil- rich Equatorial Guinea hide hundreds of millions of dollars. The federal judge questioned whether a $16 million fine agreed to by prosecutors was enough.
A new study is particularly critical of donors' tendency to use large western contractors to repair infrastructure damaged in the war, importing foreign personnel and equipment at a huge cost. In Iraq, that policy has proved disastrous, one of the authors said.
Pentagon competing with security companies for skilled commandos; Extra pay of up to $150,000.
The Pentagon is offering bonuses of up to $150,000 to keep elite commandos, such as Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs, in the military and prevent them from being lured away to higher-paying jobs by private security contractors in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, defense officials said.
An American contractor gunned down last month in Iraq had accused Iraqi Defense Ministry officials of corruption days before his death, according to documents and U.S. officials.