Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo by Laton Mccartney (books to read to be successful TXT) 📕

with him in the early 1960s. Sutowo subsequently became chairman of Pertamina, and it was through him that Bechtel became the state-owned oil company’s chief contractor, building not only all its oil projects, but its liquidnatural gas ones as well. Still more friends were made for Bechtel by Harold Wilson, the head of the company’s Indonesian operations, married to the widow of a prominent Indonesian Air Force general who, fortuitously, was the best friend of Tien Suharto, the wife of Indonesia’s President Suharto.

But the Bechtel Corporation had done more than make friends in Indonesia. According to former company executives, it had also spread prodigious amounts of cash, rumored to exceed $3 million to senior government officials in the early 1970s. Bechtel denies these allegations.

According to senior-level sources at both Bechtel and Pertamina, these payments were channeled to Indonesian officials through Bechtel’s Japanese subcontractors in Indonesia, who deposited the funds in the Bank of Hongkong on behalf of the recipients. In addition, these sources charge that Bechtel underwrote many of the high-living General Ibnu Sutowo’s expenses and made at least one more payment of $300,000 to government officials in Indonesia.

When reporters Mark Dowie, Tim Shorrock, Lyuba Zarsky and Peter Hayes revealed in June 1984 that a Bechtel consultant in Korea named Yoon Sik Cho had been 158

A FRIEND IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Much, then, was at stake for Bechtel in Indonesia, which Steve senior described to Kearns and his fellow advisory board members as possessing the potential for “hundreds of millions in U.S. exports.” It did-at least, for Bechtel-and thanks to Kearns, a $160 million loan for Pertamina sailed through.

With so much money available, and Kearns seemingly so willing to dispense it, , the friendship between the builder and the banker deepened. They talked by phone at least once a week, Kearns passing along such helpful information as which countries the bank considered credit risks, and ever soliciting Bechtel for ideas about new loan possibilities.

Bechtel was never shy in providing them. He had, in fact, all manner of notions where the bank could put its cash: the Philippines, where Eximbank provided $13.5 million to a Bechtel customer building a nickel-production facility; Egypt, where Eximbank offered $100 million so that Bechtel could build the Sumed pipeline, and especially, Algeria, where Eximbank put up $145 million to construct fertilizer plants (the same ones Bechtel had been unable to sell to the Indians) and a total of $294 million to finance Bechtel’s building of liquidnatural-gas facilities (“an extremely important” project, Bechtel told Kearns) for Sonatrach, the state-owned oil company, which during Kearns’s tenure became the bank’s largest single customer.

Kearns also opened doors for Bechtel with important members of the Nixon administration. At Kearns’s invitation, Treasury Secretary John Connally, Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, Labor Secretary George Shultz, Office of Management and Budget Director Caspar Weinberger and Peter G. Peterson, executive director of the president’s cabinet-level Council on International Economic Policy, all dropped by the bank for lunch and the chance to meet the remarkable Steve Bechtel.

Nor was that the end of Kearns’s helpfulness. W hen Bechtel complained about the slowness of the bank’s lending procedures, warning that such delays might cost U.S. companies valuable business, Kearns persuaded the administration to drop the requirement that loans be providing expensive gifts to Korean officials in an effort to help Bechtel gain major nuclear contracts there, the company flatly denied the charges. According to Bechtel, a federal grand jury investigated the charges and failed to return