By Prensa Latina,
Washington : The scandal of the AEY company is an example of the cynicism of the George W. Bush government in the concessions of contracts, at the expense of tax payers, reported The New York Times.
An editorial of the influential newspaper criticized the deal representing about 300 million dollars between the Pentagon and AEY Inc. whose owners and some of its collaborators are accused of fraud.
The company owner, arms dealer Efraim E. Diveroli, was granted a contract in the millions to supply munitions to the security forces in Afghanistan.
However, the deal fell through when it was learned that the cartridges were 40 years old.
The company and its president had told the army that the munitions were manufactured in Albania but the district attorney said they were from China.
Since 2007 AEY, based in Miami Beach, had become the main supplier of munitions to the Afghan army and police, backed by a two year contract.
The New York Times questions, and so does representative Henry Waxman, how it was possible that a smuggler like Diveroli achieved such a large contract with the Pentagon when its company is among the 80 thousand companies that the State Departments considers illegal arms traffickers.
AEY also enjoyed another six million dollar agreement to supply 10,000 pistols to the Iraqi army.
Several congresspersons have denounced the concession of contracts without bidding by the Bush administration; many are for the Republican election backing companies such as Halliburton in which vice president Richard Cheney had been its CEO.
In an audience in the Capitol in August 2005, evidence was presented demonstrating the close ties between high-level officials of the Defense Department and that oil company.
During the session, representative Waxman revealed the result of a military auditing that pointed to doubts over the outlay of 1.3 billion dollars in “questionable expenditures and without proper justification,” granted by the Pentagon to Kellogg Brown Root, then one of the subsidiaries of Halliburton.
The investigation by the Auditing Agency of Contracts of the Defense Department qualified payments as absurd, many lacking receipts or explanations.