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Report Says Oil Agency Ran Amok
Derek Kravitz and Mary Pat Flaherty, Washington Post
Interior Dept. Inquiry Finds Sex, Corruption
—
Government officials in charge of collecting billions of dollars worth of royalties from oil and gas companies accepted gifts, steered contracts to favored clients and engaged in drug use and illicit sex with employees of the energy firms, federal investigators reported yesterday.
Investigators from the Interior Department’s inspector general’s office said more than a dozen employees, including the former director of the oil royalty program, took meals, ski trips, sports tickets and golf outings from industry representatives. The report alleges that the former director, Gregory W. Smith, also netted more than $30,000 from improper outside work.
The report from Inspector General Earl E. Devaney contains fresh allegations about the practices at the beleaguered royalty-in-kind program of Interior’s Minerals Management Service, which last year collected more than $4 billion worth of oil and natural gas from companies given contracts to tap energy on federal and Indian lands and offshore.
(11 September 2008)
A breaking story that the oil industry does not need. Red meat for the bloggers, though. -BA
MMS Chicks Drilling for Dollars and Drugs
Mary Ann Akers, Washington Post
Given the new report exposing sex, drugs and other wild times at the Interior Department’s federal oil and minerals revenue agency, the burning question in Washington today is: which tawdry men’s magazine will be first to publish a “Women of the Minerals Management Service” spread?
A story in in today’s Washington Post paints a picture of an agency run amok with employees boozing it up, toking it up, teeing it up and snorting it up with representatives from the big oil and energy companies, from which the Minerals Management Service collects billions of dollars in royalties annually.
An Interior Department inspector general report discovered a “culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” in which agency workers took free golf trips and other gratuities from executives of Shell, Chevron, Hess and Gary-Williams Energy. They drank together, smoked pot, snorted cocaine and even had sex, according to the IG report. The hardest partyers at the Minerals Management Service earned the nickname “MMS Chicks.”
(11 September 2008)
Sex ‘n drugs ‘n minerals management
Robert McClure, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The headlines about the sex-n-drugs scandal at the Minerals Management Service are predictably focusing on the cocaine, the pot, the sexual indiscretions. And a lot of the tops of the stories focus on the football games, paintball outings and the like proferred to the government’s oil buyers and sellers by Big Oil. It was, says Interior Inpector Earl E. Devaney, who issued the report, “A culture of ethical failure.”
And you have to hand it to Devaney for stating the obvious:
Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length.
And amid all the wink-wink-nudge-nudge, don’t fail to notice that the hanky-panky after hours was just window dressing on what was going on right in the MMS offices in Denver. Self-dealing that seems likely to, uh, rob taxpayers was rampant. One bureaucrat has already pleaded guilty, but federal prosecutors declined to go after two higher-ranking officials.
(11 September 2008)
