Halliburton Co

Halliburton Co. subsidiary KBR has agreed to lop $9 million off sole-source contracts paid for by the U.S. government with Iraqi oil money after auditors questioned $208 million in possible overcharges, an international watchdog agency said. The International Advisory and Monitoring Board said it only recently learned of the Dec. 22 settlement between the Pentagon and KBR. The contracts were part of $1.

The Army has decided to reimburse a Halliburton subsidiary all but $9 million of nearly $222 million in costs that Pentagon auditors questioned for oil industry work in Iraq, military officials said Monday. At issue is a $2.4-billion contract awarded without competitive bidding to the subsidiary, KBR, to deliver fuel to Iraqis and repair oil equipment.

Frustrated government auditors pleaded, cajoled and finally threatened Halliburton Co. executives who repeatedly failed to comply with government reporting requirements under a key Iraq contract with a $1.2-billion potential price tag, newly released documents show. The documents, along with a report, were issued Tuesday by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Government Reform. Rep. Henry A.

Halliburton earned a record $2.4 billion last year, but Houston executives will forgo Texas-sized luxury when they go this week to Duncan, Okla., a rural county seat. Shareholders, who have gathered for the company's annual meeting since 2003 at Houston's lavish Four Seasons Hotel, will meet Wednesday in the modern but far humbler setting of Duncan's convention center. Halliburton Co. says it moved its meeting to this company town of 22,500 to honor its southern Oklahoma roots.

The Army is discontinuing a controversial multibillion-dollar deal with oil services giant Halliburton Co. to provide logistical support to U.S. troops worldwide. The decision comes after several years of attacks by critics who saw the contract as a symbol of politically connected corporations profiteering on the Iraq war.

Halliburton Co. executives ordered a big-screen television and 10 large tubs of tacos, chicken wings and cheese sticks delivered to Iraq for last year's Super Bowl, then billed U.S. taxpayers for their party, according to a lawsuit unsealed Friday.

Halliburton Co. said Sunday that its third-quarter net income rose 22%, thanks in part to fewer disruptions from hurricanes, which beset the oil industry last year. The Houston-based firm's engineering unit, KBR, had $2.4 billion in revenue compared with $2.3 billion in the third quarter of 2005. KBR has kept the company, once led by Vice President Dick Cheney, under lawmakers' microscope for its work in Iraq since a U.S.-led coalition invaded the country three years ago.

Oil-field services conglomerate Halliburton Co. told analysts that it planned to complete a spinoff of engineering and construction unit KBR by April. Houston-based Halliburton said in July that it would pursue a spinoff rather than a previously announced initial public offering, but Chief Executive Dave Lesar said Monday that the company believed an IPO could still be in the works because the market had improved.

The Pentagon's largest contractor in Iraq, Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, routinely hid information about its work from the public by marking it as proprietary when it wasn't, a U.S. government report said. The company's actions were an abuse of federal contracting rules designed to protect proprietary information, said the report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. Information as fundamental as the number of meals being served to U.S.

Halliburton Co. has said it will agree to the Securities and Exchange Commission's request for more time to probe possible bribery and corruption in connection with natural gas operations in Nigeria. The oil field services conglomerate disclosed the SEC's request for a "tolling" agreement in a regulatory filing. Such an accord will delay when the legal clock starts running, or tolling, on the case under the statute of limitations -- generally five years for such investigations.