Koch Industries

Investigators implicated a Kansas-based oil company Tuesday in testimony before a Senate panel that is checking allegations of millions of dollars in oil and royalties being stolen from Indians. The investigators told a special unit of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs that Koch Industries, which does a large amount of business on Indian oil fields, over the last three years consistently took hundreds of thousands more barrels of crude oil than it paid for. But Donald L. Cordes, Koch Industries vice president for legal and corporate affairs, said the Senate panel did not reveal that the so-called overages were a small percentage of the total oil that the company buys and resells.

Investigators told a special Senate committee today that a Wichita, Kan., company has been stealing oil from Indian lands for at least the last three years. Documents subpoenaed from Koch Industries show that the company consistently ended the year with hundreds of thousands more barrels of oil than it paid for, investigators told a special panel of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs. Although measurement difficulties make it normal for oil companies to pay for less oil than they actually take--even up to 12,000 barrels a year--Koch documents showed that the firm ended 1986 with 803,874 excess barrels, 1987 with 671,144 excess barrels and 1988 with 474,281 more barrels than it paid for, witnesses said.