New bid, same result: KBR shares big Army contract

WASHINGTON — Houston-based KBR has again been selected to participate in a 10-year military logistical support contract valued at up to $150 billion, the U.S. Army announced today.

The Army Sustainment Command, at the insistence of the Government Accountability Office, had re-evaluated its decision last summer to award the massive contract to KBR, Fort Worth-based DynCorp International and Fluor Intercontinental of Greenville, S.C.

But after rebidding the contract, the Army chose the same three players.

Currently, KBR has sole responsibility for providing support services to troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of the world, under a logistics contract valued at $27 billion. The bulk of that work — more than $24 billion obligated to date — has resulted from the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, Army records show.

But when awarding the new contract this time around, Army officials opted to split up the contract work in the hopes of stimulating competition among the three participants.

The Rock Island, Ill.-based Army Sustainment Command awarded the newest logistics contract to KBR, DynCorp and Fluor last June, after taking bids from six companies.

Two firms on the losing end of that decision — IAP Worldwide Services and Contingency Management Group — filed protests.

After reviewing their complaints, the GAO found flaws in the Army's evaluation of the proposals from KBR and Fluor. Read more..
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/5710119.html

Top Iraq contractor skirts US taxes offshore

Shell companies in Cayman Islands allow KBR to avoid Medicare, Social Security deductions.

CAYMAN ISLANDS - Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation's top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.

More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq - including about 10,500 Americans - are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands. Read more..
http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2008/03/06/top_iraq_contractor_skirts_us_taxes_offshore/

Victim: Gang-Rape Cover-Up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR

A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.