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Commentary
WASHINGTON, September 19, 2005 — Earlier this year, I wrote front-page stories in The Indian Express newspaper in which one of the government's highest law officers (the attorney general or a subordinate) advised narrowing or shutting down probes into political scandals by the Central Bureau of Investigation, the country's premier investigating agency. This was no small matter. The CBI is analogous to the American FBI, and a significant number of the cases under its jurisdiction deal with corruption and public fraud. >>
Commentary
August 6, 2005 — I tried for years to get on to Fleet Street and nearly gave up. Then, with one of those strokes of luck which all journalists need, in 1965 I wiggled my way on to the Sunday Times. I'd done one story for it as a freelance and had been given a spare desk and a telephone. >>
Commentary
July 22, 2005 — Mexican TV networks, which in years past had a tradition of imposing tight self-censorship on themselves, are now playing a leading role in the country's media coverage of politics. >>
In the News
June 20, 2005 — South Africa is in the news again, with the decision by the national prosecuting authority to charge the sacked deputy president Jacob Zuma on two charges of corruption. >>
WASHINGTON, June 10, 2005 — Colombia is a country of extreme news, as evidenced by just one day's headlines: 17 military killed in a guerrilla ambush; U.S. soldiers caught smuggling cocaine out of the country; 19 of Bogotá's 20 deputy mayors fired by the mayor while most of them were under investigation on allegations of corruption. >>
Commentary
WASHINGTON, January 31, 2005 — Those who report on political corruption must often confront everything from insidious lies to death threats. Over the next few days, four journalists-from Russia, Peru, Zimbabwe, and the United States-describe the deteriorating state of press freedom in their respective parts of the world and the risks they face personally in trying to uncover the truth.
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WASHINGTON, November 3, 2004 — Documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity show that the Army Corps of Engineers ignored sharp objections by its top procurement official concerning Halliburton contracts in Iraq and the Balkans. >>
WASHINGTON, August 18, 2004 — The oil services company Halliburton, largely through its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, has received more revenue from government contracts in the last year than from 1998 through 2002. In 2003, when the company had record revenue of $16.3 billion, Halliburton received contracts from the Department of Defense worth $4.3 billion, while in the previous five years it obtained less than $2.5 billion from the military, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity. >>
WASHINGTON, July 28, 2004 — The Center for Public Integrity has obtained the 11 work orders worth $66.2 million awarded to CACI International Inc., the company at the heart of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq. Details of the work orders did not come to light until last April, when reports emerged of U.S. interrogators allegedly abusing prisoners at the notorious Baghdad prison. >>
WASHINGTON, July 7, 2004 — More than 150 American companies have received contracts worth up to $48.7 billion for work in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the latest update of the Center for Public Integrity's Windfalls of War project. This figure represents an increase of 82 companies and more than $40 billion since the Center first released its study of contracts awarded to U.S. companies for postwar work in Afghanistan and Iraq on Oct. 30, 2003.
 See also Inside a War-Time Contract — A timeline of Fuel Distribution Task Order 0005 >>
WASHINGTON, June 30, 2004 — A private military company that has won contracts to assist the U.S. military in Iraq wrote the Pentagon rules for contractors on the battlefield. >>
Original Source
WASHINGTON, June 13, 2004 — Reports on the use of contractors in Iraq have disclosed that private-sector employees have been performing sensitive intelligence work in and around combat zones. What's more, the report by Major General Antonio Taguba on the alleged abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib Prison noted the involvement of civilian contractors at the Baghdad facility. >>
Special Report
WASHINGTON, April 29, 2004 — In an unprecedented international investigation into the precise extent of openness, accountability and governance in 25 countries that hold elections, no country ranked in the top tier, the Center for Public Integrity has found. >> 
April 29, 2004 — The Public Integrity Index is the centerpiece of the Global Integrity Report, providing a quantitative scorecard of governance practices in each country. The Public Integrity Index assesses the institutions and practices that citizens can use to hold their governments accountable to the public interest. The Public Integrity Index does not measure corruption itself, but rather the opposite of corruption: the extent of citizens' ability to ensure their government is open and accountable. >>
WASHINGTON, October 30, 2003 — More than 70 American companies and individuals have won up to $8 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two years, according to a new study by the Center for Public Integrity. >>
WASHINGTON, October 30, 2003 — Raytheon Aerospace, which changed its name to Vertex Aerospace in June 2003, and its related companies have received more than $2.7 billion in U.S. government contracts since 1990, and the company is currently in Afghanistan with a contract from the Defense Department worth at least $7.4 million involving aircraft repair and maintenance. >>
WASHINGTON, October 30, 2003 — Government contracting has always been a complex matter, thick with legal wrangling and bureaucracy, but the last decade has seen a radical change in how the U.S. government purchases goods and services. >>
WASHINGTON, October 30, 2003 — On May 22, the U.N. Security Council gathered in New York to approve a resolution lifting sanctions on Iraq, creating a Development Fund for the country and providing limited immunity to corporations involved in oil and gas deals there for the next four years. The resolution directed that proceeds from future sales of Iraqi oil and gas be placed in the development fund and allowed the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to disburse the funds in consultation with the interim Iraqi administration. >>
WASHINGTON, October 30, 2003 — One of the more interesting Iraq contracts the Center uncovered involves a tiny firm called Sullivan Haave Associates. >>
WASHINGTON, October 30, 2003 — The Pentagon has awarded seven contracts to San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp. to oversee much of the massive jobs of building a new government and mass media in post-war Iraq. Although the Defense Department and SAIC have chosen to keep much of the contract information secret—including the cost—the Center for Public Integrity has been able to glean some interesting details about the deals, which were all awarded in February 2003. The contracts all appear to last for one year and call for all of the work to be directed by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Feith's top deputy at the Pentagon is Christopher "Ryan" Henry. Henry was a senior vice president at SAIC until October 2002. >>
WASHINGTON, October 30, 2003 — While the Defense and State Departments have granted the lion's share of contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan directly from Washington, a few U.S. companies have made their deals directly with local governing authorities that have emerged with U.S. support or direction. >>
SYDNEY, Australia, February 14, 2003 — For two months in 1998, more than 3 million residents of Sydney were forced to boil their drinking water to kill parasites. While blame for the contamination was never established, a government-commissioned probe showed that a private water company's operational practices had risked the safety of the water supply. >>
ADELAIDE, Australia, February 14, 2003 — Fifteen months after Adelaide signed a contract turning over its waterworks to a private consortium controlled by Thames Water and Vivendi, the city was engulfed in a powerful sewage smell, which became known as "the big pong.'' >>
HAMILTON, Canada, February 13, 2003 — Hamilton was the first privatized large water utility in Canada, a country where waterworks have been overwhelmingly a public affair – and where most people like it that way. The Hamilton experience was supposed to demonstrate an alternative, free market model, supposed to change public opinion. It has. But not as expected. >>
CAMDEN, N.J., February 12, 2003 — Camden's poor fell victim in a water deal polluted by the city's chronic debt and rampant corruption. >>
INDIANAPOLIS, February 12, 2003 — When Indianapolis suddenly found its 131-year old private water company for sale, swift action gave the city control over its utility and the new company hired to run it. >>
ATLANTA, February 12, 2003 — Last summer, the Buckhead neighborhood found more than sugar crystals in the children's Kool-Aid. Lax billing, broken pipes – and dirty water from them – prompted the mayor to consider firing Atlanta's private water company. >>
WASHINGTON, February 12, 2003 — Foreign private companies are gearing up to control a multibillion-dollar market to upgrade the nation's aging water system, after spending millions of dollars over the last six years to sway Congressional votes on privatization laws. Americans have the safest and cheapest public water systems in the world. But, as foreign companies flex their financial muscle, America's drinking water may not be so cheap or public for long. >>
BOGOTA, Colombia, February 11, 2003 — Coastal Cartagena was the first of about 50 cities and towns to privatize its water in Colombia. The capital Bogotá bucked the privatization trend, refused World Bank money and transformed its public utility into the most successful in Colombia. >>
JAKARTA, Indonesia, February 10, 2003 — Two powerful multinationals deftly used the World Bank and a compliant dictatorship to split control of a major city's waterworks. >>
MANILA, Philippines, February 7, 2003 — Politically connected families and private companies split Manila in two to share turf. At first, the two companies brought miracles by bringing running water to thousands of poor people who never had it. Now the miracle has faded as one company bails out, leaving behind enormous debts. >>
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina, February 6, 2003 — Global water giants partnered to run a water system in the Argentine capital that the World Bank touted as a model of privatization. Investors extracted millions in profits. But now the model is crumbling under the weight of mounting costs. >>
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, February 5, 2003 — The biggest problem in this country ravaged by AIDS, tuberculosis and malnourishment, is water. Few can afford it. But with World Bank blessing, the government is trying to end water subsidies, forcing millions of South Africans to seek their water from polluted rivers and lakes. The result: one of the largest outbreaks of cholera. >>
PARIS, February 4, 2003 — While peddling the benefits of free-market privatization abroad, France carefully guards its own borders against foreign companies, claiming water is too important to be controlled by outsiders. >>
PARIS, February 4, 2003 — France is the birthplace of modern water privatization, but its leading companies have been rocked by scandals and allegations of influence-peddling. >>
OTTAWA, February 3, 2003 — In conjunction with ICIJ's global investigation, Bob Carty, an ICIJ member in Canada and a radio producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), has prepared a five-part documentary series. >>
WASHINGTON, February 3, 2003 — An analysis of World Bank lending policies shows that the bank has increasingly linked aid to privatization. >>
February 3, 2003 — The explosive growth of three private water utility companies in the last 10 years raises fears that mankind may be losing control of its most vital resource to a handful of monopolistic corporations. In Europe and North America, analysts predict that within the next 15 years these companies will control 65 percent to 75 percent of what are now public waterworks. The companies have worked closely with the World Bank and other international financial institutions to gain a foothold on every continent. They aggressively lobby for legislation and trade laws to force cities to privatize their water and set the agenda for debate on solutions to the world's increasing water scarcity. The companies argue they are more efficient and cheaper than public utilities. Critics say they are predatory capitalists that ultimately plan to control the world's water resources and drive up prices even as the gap between rich and poor widens. The fear is that accountability will vanish, and the world will lose control of its source of life. >>
WASHINGTON, November 20, 2002 — Victor Bout's air cargo companies shipped vegetables and crayfish from South Africa to Europe, transported United Nations peacekeepers from Pakistan to East Timor, and reportedly assisted the logistics of Operation Restore Hope, the U.S.-led military famine relief effort in Somalia in 1993. "That was the staple stuff," a former associate, said. "The dodgy flights were all extras." Those "dodgy flights" included shipping arms that fueled Africa's bloodiest conflicts, and earned Bout his reputation as the "merchant of death." Read more in the 11th and final part of Making a Killing: The Business of War. >>
WASHINGTON, November 18, 2002 — It was not until weeks after Italian police arrested Leonid Minin in a Milan hotel room on charges of cocaine possession that they learned that the man with the expensive drug habit was under investigation in five countries for various crimes. It would take even longer to piece together the documents that he carried with him, papers that would tell the story of his illegal arms trading, including selling weapons to the most brutal of Africa's rebel insurgencies, the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone. Read more in the tenth part of Making a Killing: The Business of War. >>
WASHINGTON, November 15, 2002 — The long and storied career of Jacques Monsieur, a Belgian nicknamed "the field marshal" who has been active in arms trading since the 1980s, illustrates that often arms dealers who are ostensibly profit-seeking freelancers actually serve the interests of Western intelligence services and corporate elites. They violate U.N. arms embargoes with the implicit – sometimes explicit – approval of government officials, and attempt to tip the balance in armed conflicts for the benefit of business interests. Read the ninth part of "Making a Killing: The Business of War." >>
WASHINGTON, November 13, 2002 — Arcadi Gaydamak claims to be among the five richest men in Israel, which would put him in the billionaire category. He owes this vast fortune, he said, to shrewd speculation on the Russian stock market, particularly oil stocks, and not to the profits of war. Gaydamak insists he was never an arms dealer, rather a "financier of deals." The financier, who seldom signs anything and operates through labyrinthine shell companies, epitomizes the business of war in the post-Cold War era: an entrepreneur with global ties to arms smuggling, resource exploitation and private military companies. Read the eighth part of Making a Killing: The Business of War. >>
WASHINGTON, November 11, 2002 — Niko Shefer leaned forward and explained the competitive advantage small entrepreneurs enjoy over corporate multinationals when doing business in war-ravaged countries like Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. "I move with cash. I can buy the president a Mercedes 600. How can a normal company justify that? How do they explain that to the shareholders? I do not need board meetings. I am the board," said Shefer, one of a new breed of adventurers and opportunists who have the acumen and the ruthlessness to profit from Africa's war zones. Read more in the seventh part of Making a Killing: The Business of War. >>
WASHINGTON, November 8, 2002 — The sudden renaissance of diamond mining and trading around Kimberley, South Africa — the birthplace of that nation's diamond industry — has fed rumors in the close-knit international diamond community that the area has become a major laundering center for Africa's "conflict diamonds" – stones from areas of Africa wracked by civil war, where combatants use their control of the mines to fund arms purchases for their fight. Poor controls in the international diamond industry are undercutting attempts to clamp down on the trade in conflict diamonds that allegedly fund terrorist organizations. Read the sixth part of Making a Killing: The Business of War. >>
WASHINGTON, November 6, 2002 — In April 2001, a representative from MPRI — a Viriginia-based private military company — met with the Pentagon's regional director for Central Africa to discuss the company's hopes of winning the contract to train Equatorial Guinea's forces. "They may need our help or moral support," Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski wrote in a memo on the meeting, obtained by ICIJ under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. She quoted the MPRI representative as saying that Equatorial Guinea, an African nation with a population of less than 5 million, was "the Kuwait of the Gulf of Guinea" and, in a briefing paper three months later, advanced that characterization to "a possible 'Kuwait of Africa' with huge oil reserves" that was "US-friendly for both investment and security reasons." Yet the Kuwait of Africa is plagued by corruption, poverty, and a regime that regularly engages in human rights abuses. Read the fifth part of Making a Killing: The Business of War. >>
WASHINGTON, November 4, 2002 — On July 15, 2000, the Marathon Oil Company sent $13.7 million to an account in the English isle of Jersey. The owner of the Jersey account was Sonangol, Angola's state oil company, and the sum represented one-third of a bonus that the Texas-based company agreed to pay the Angolan government for rights to pump the country's offshore oil reserves. That same day, Sonangol transferred an identical sum of money out of Jersey to another Sonangol account in an unknown location. Over the course of that summer, large sums of money traveled from the Jersey account to, among others, a private security company owned by a former Angolan minister, a charitable foundation run by the Angolan president, and a private Angolan bank that counts an alleged arms dealer among its shareholders. Read the fourth part of Making a Killing: The Business of War. >>
WASHINGTON, October 30, 2002 — In October 1996, three ex-soldiers met for lunch in an Italian restaurant just off King's Road in Chelsea, one of London's toniest districts. They discussed the fortunes of a company with which they were all associated called Executive Outcomes, whose business was intervening in Africa's wars — for a price. "It was becoming clear that EO … carried a lot of political baggage," Tim Spicer, one of the diners who was perhaps Britain's best-known mercenary, later observed. His companions suggested a plan to rebrand, restyle and relaunch the "dogs of war." Read the third part of Making a Killing: The Business of War. >>
WASHINGTON, October 28, 2002 — In 1998, unbeknownst to most Americans, the United States had a military presence in a remote African war that drew little attention from the media. Unlike other U.S. interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti and Kosovo, there was no hand-wringing over whether a deployment was justified by U.S. national interests, whether troops would be spread too thin, whether American men and women should be put in harm's way in a fight that had little to do with Main Street America, or whether the level of barbarity justified, on its own merits, the deployment of U.S. troops on humanitarian grounds. >>
WASHINGTON, October 28, 2002 — Amid the global military downsizing and increasing number of small conflicts that followed the end of the Cold War, governments have turned increasingly to private military companies – a recently coined euphemism for mercenaries – to intervene on their behalf. A nearly two-year investigation by the Center for Public Integrity's International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has identified at least 90 such companies worldwide. The ICIJ investigation also uncovered a small group of individuals and companies with connections to governments, multinational corporations and, sometimes, criminal syndicates in the United States, Europe, Africa and the Middle East that have profited from war commerce. Read more in ICIJ's 11-part series. >>
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