Government Contracts

Moving to head off a trade war, negotiators from the United States and the European Community lengthened the fuse on one of their most explosive disputes Monday and began exploring the possibility of deep, worldwide tariff reductions. Mickey Kantor, in his first visit to EC headquarters as U.S. trade representative, said the United States will delay for three weeks its threatened retaliation over an EC policy that favors European bidders on some government procurement contracts.

WorldCom Inc.'s suspension from competing for lucrative government contracts could be a short-term windfall for rivals, especially No. 1 U.S. long-distance telephone company AT&T Corp., analysts said. The General Services Administration on Thursday temporarily banned WorldCom, which plans to change its name to MCI, from winning contracts, saying the firm lacked proper internal controls and business ethics. "Obviously, this is a big short-term win for AT&T and Sprint [Corp.

For airline passengers, the attempted Christmas Day attack and a directive by President Obama to pursue advanced screening technology will certainly mean added security procedures at airports. So for high-tech companies in Southern California and elsewhere, the increased focus on airport security means new opportunities to land hefty government contracts. Among those is Syagen Technology Inc., a Tustin company with 20 employees that has built an airport screening device that blows air on travelers and then analyzes the cast-off particles to detect explosives.

Despite years of affirmative action programs, minorities and women remain largely shut out of the billions of dollars in public contracts awarded each year by California's three biggest government entities, documents show. Companies owned by white males continue to receive the great majority of public contracts with the state of California, city of Los Angeles and county of Los Angeles. "Even with affirmative action, we're still only getting crumbs," Latino state Sen. Richard G.

U.S. and Japanese negotiators reached tentative agreement early Friday on a plan to resolve U.S. complaints about Tokyo's refusal to buy American-made supercomputers--one of three specific trade disputes about which Washington is threatening to retaliate.

A Minnesota construction company which has paved roads at the White Sands Missile Base in New Mexico raises a problem that President Clinton largely glossed over Wednesday in his impassioned endorsement of federal affirmative action. When most Americans think of "affirmative action," they think of jobs and college admissions. But at the federal level, the biggest battles have been fought over government contracts.

A federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted former Illinois Gov. George Ryan on an extensive list of corruption charges, including taking money and gifts in exchange for granting government contracts. The indictment, the result of a five-year racketeering investigation, is the latest chapter in an ongoing scandal that dogged Ryan's four years as governor and led him to end his political career.

Suzanne H. Woolsey is a trustee of a little-known defense consulting group that had inside access to senior Pentagon leaders directing the Iraq war. Last January, she joined the board of California-based Fluor Corp. Soon afterward, Fluor and a joint venture partner won about $1.6 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts. Her husband, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, a leading advocate for the war, is serving as a government policy advisor. He too works for a firm with war-related interests.

Under a federal program to transform government facilities into models of energy efficiency, Honeywell International Inc. came calling on Army commanders here with a deal to replace the base's decades-old steam power plant. The company proposed installing millions of dollars in new heating equipment and hooking the base to the local power grid -- all free in exchange for the company getting the bulk of future energy savings. It was precisely the kind of deal that politicians and bureaucrats in Washington were pushing at facilities across the country -- modernizing aging machinery without the government spending any money of its own. But today, the Ft. Richardson deal, one of the largest among hundreds of similar contracts, has sunk into a morass of accounting disputes and allegations of misconduct.

The White House anti-drug office has come under attack from a Republican senator and anti-smoking groups for awarding a multimillion-dollar advertising contract to a company that handles publicity for a major tobacco company. Bates USA works for one of tobacco company Brown and Williamson's leading cigarette brands--Lucky Strike--and, according to industry sources, has just won accounts worth $50 million to advertise the company's Kool and Capri brands.