More on the “This worries the Koch Brothers” story

by David Safier

h/t to Cheri who left a comment pointing to a prepublication review of the Bloomberg expose on the Koch Brothers. The Brothers K have been sweating the arrival of this article and have put out a few "prebuttal items" to, they hope, dampen its effects.

The article is apparently 14 pages long — that's 14 advertising-free pages. Here's a distillation by the reviewer of some of the revelations in the article:

– Koch Industries used the European offices of their subsidiary Koch-Glitsch to sell millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran in an apparent violation of the US-Iran trade embargo, as recently as 2007

– Internal documents of Koch Industries prove that the company took elaborate steps to ensure that their US-employees weren't involved in the sales to Iran

– While is not 100% certain at this point that Koch Industries did in fact violate US law, according to Bloomberg Markets Magazine, internal memos show for example that the details of the sales with Iran were meticulously checked by US lawyers of Koch Industries and coordinated with the lawyers in order to fully ensure that no visible involvement of US-citizens took place

– Koch Industries paid bribes in six countries from 2002 to 2008 to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East, comparable to similar behaviour of German technology giant Siemens (Siemens subsequently had to pay a $ 1.6 billion fine!)

– Koch Industries sacked a compliance officer in France in June 2009 who discovered the illegal bribes at Koch Industries subsidiary Koch-Glitsch

– These revelations were made possible through newly discovered documents from two labour court cases in France

– Bloomberg Markets reveals that former employees of Koch Industries harshly criticize the company for their internal practises and ethics

– The story also covers in great detail over several pages earlier violations of Koch Industries: The company in the past "rigged prices with competitors, lied to regulators and repeatedly run afoul of environmental regulations, resulting in five criminal convictions since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada"

The more revealed about these billionaire scoundrels, who can spend multi-millions to fund their political agenda with less personal economic pain than a $25 contribution from one of us (and when we give, we don't get back dollars-on-the-penny returns in tax breaks, subsidies and regulation roll-backs), the better.