Pentagon overpaid billionaire oil tycoon by $200 million in rigged procurement scandal
Sargeant is pictured in the middle.
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A Pentagon audit has revealed that the federal government overpaid a billionaire oilman up to $200 million.
The audit found that Harry Sargeant III was overpaid on several military contracts worth nearly $2.7 billion.
It also found that three contracts the Florida businessman won were awarded under conditions that effectively eliminated the other bidders.
The audit, by the Defense Department’s inspector general, was posted on the Pentagon’s web site this week.
It estimated that the department paid the oilman '$160 [million] to $204 million more for fuel than could be supported by price or cost analysis'.
Sargeant, a once prominent Republican donor, first faced scrutiny over his defence work in October 2008, when he was accused in a congressional probe of using his close relationship with Jordan’s royal family to secure exclusive rights over supply routes to U.S. bases in western Iraq.
According to the Washington Post, Republican Henry A. Waxman who led the probe, asserted in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates that Sargeant had won the three jet fuel contracts, despite having the highest bids, because he had an effective monopoly over the routes.
Mar 20, 2011 at 6:59 PM
Reader Comments (6)
Harley CEO awards self $6.4 million bonus
http://www.mybudget360.com/federal-reserve-financial-beast-maiden-lane-commercial-real-estate-bailout-hilton-waldorf-jpmorgan-bank-fed/
Strangely the hijackers conveniently crashed a plane into the newly moved Accounting Department destroying all the records .
Watch this video at 50 seconds in !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kpWqdPMjmo&feature=related
A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html
I'm talking technology, not politics
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/27/someone_must_have_a_thorium_reactor/
The most cheering thing I've heard recently on this subject is that the price of thorium is now positive. That might not mean much without explanation, so here goes: There's thorium in all sorts of minerals from which we already extract interesting metals. The tantalite and columbite that we make our capacitors from for example: there's enough in the wastes from their processing that old factories that used to do this are now Super Fund sites in the US.
Vast sums of money being spent carting off the lightly radioactive wastes into secure storage (actually, just to piles by uranium mills). And if you actually happen to have any thorium around, as I do, getting rid of it is a very expensive proposition.
The usual solution to this sort of problem is that you refine whatever it is up to a useful commercial purity then sell it. But there's almost no one out there still using thorium: thus the price of thorium, given the disposal costs, is actually negative. Until just recently, that is.
Lynas, which has built a new rare earths refinery in Malaysia, will have thorium as a byproduct (there's always Th in your rare earth ores). They've announced that they're getting offers to actually buy it from them: the price has turned positive.
Now, OK, that's possibly only a matter of interest to metals geeks like myself: but what it actually means is that someone, somewhere, is being serious about starting up test runs of thorium reactors. It's the only possible use for the material these days in any quantity.
If someone's buying then someone is at least considering filling up a test reactor. My best guess is that this is the Indian research programme: although it could, possibly, be the Russian one and there are rumours of a Chinese as well.
Which I take to be cheering news: for there's no particular problem with thorium reactors. The engineering's pretty well known, it can't go bang, all it really needs is someone to actually build and test at size the technology. And, as I say, if thorium has turned positive in price then I have to assume that that's exactly what someone is doing.