Reply #5: Here's more on the Halliburton link.

[robertpaulsen]

How much do you want to bet all these companies are tied into A.Q. Khan's Nuclear Walmart?


Far West Ltd, Halliburton, Diligence LLC, New Bridge and Neil Bush
The connection to Far West Ltd of Filin, Likhvinsky, Surikov and Saidov (along with Alfonso Davidovich) has since been stunningly corroborated by a news story on the Pravda-info website (May 3, 2005) about Far West Ltd and Kosyakov's resignation from it.
At a meeting of its stockholders on May 2 in the Hotel Ritz Carlton in Dubai, Far West Ltd accepted the retirement of the president...Leonid Kosyakov, who moved to government service in Ukraine. Vladimir Filin, member of the Editorial Board of Pravda-info, was elected the new president, at the same time retaining his previous position as executive director. The meeting of stockholders, in accordance with its charter, selected new members of the board of directors of Far West Ltd, which will now contain nine members. Besides Vladimir Filin, Anatolii Baranov and Anton Surikov, it will include four more members of the Editorial Board of Pravda-info: Audrius Butkevicius, Aleksei Likhvintsev, Natal'ia Roeva, and Ruslan Saidov, and also Valerii Lunev,(59) a veteran of the Armed Forces, and Alfonso Davidovich, a political scientist from Venezuela.

Far West, the story said,
...specialises in consulting work on questions of security in conducting business in regions of the world with unstable environments and hiring personnel for foreign private military companies (last three words in English). Its head office is located in Switzerland. In addition, the Agency (Far West Ltd) has a network of representatives in the OAE (United Arab Emirates), Afghanistan, Colombia, the autonomous region of Kosovo, the autonomous republic of Crimea, Georgia, and the Volga Federal District of the RF (Russian Federation).60

In 2005, Filin gave Pravda-info (September 2) some details about Far West's work, and revealed that the firm had been co-founded by "a sub-division of a well-known American corporation". He said that the company's new contract is:
...connected with the secured transport of commercial shipments from Afghanistan, where we have an office, to ports on the Black Sea. In Afghanistan there is a well-known US air base in Bagram. It is connected by an aerial bridge with a number of other US air bases. For example, with the largest base in Frankfurt-on-Main, that's in Germany, with an intermediary landing in Chkalovsk, in the Moscow area. But the most commercially attractive route seems to be that from Bagram to the US air base in Magas, in Kyrgyzstan. By the way, it is quite near the Russian air base in Kant. A significant flow of shipments passes through Magas; there is a niche there for commercial shipments, too. This is very profitable. It is much more profitable than routing commercial shipments from Afghanistan through Tajikistan. Therefore last year we completely withdrew from all shipping through Tajikistan and closed our office in that country.
(Pravda-info:) Who are your partners?
Who our partners are is a commercial secret. I can say that they are four private firms from three countries—Turkey, Russia and the USA—which engage among other things in shipping. One of these firms is a sub-division of a well-known American corporation. This firm is a co-founder of our agency.61

We can assume that Pravda-info is an inside source for information about Far West, for the two organisations seem in fact to be two different manifestations of the same group. Among the directors of Far West on the masthead of Pravda-info we find first of all Anton Surikov, followed by Anatolii Baranov, Aleksei Likhvintsev, Ruslan Saidov, Vladimir Filin, Natal'ia Roeva and Audrius Butkevicius.62
Also on the Pravda-info masthead is Boris Kagarlitsky, who, as we saw in the first part of this essay, is a main source for the Western accounts of the meeting in southern France, written by Patrick Cockburn, Nafeez Ahmed and John Dunlop.63 Many of the Far West directors, notably Anton Surikov, are or have been associated with Kagarlitsky at the Moscow Institute of Globalization Studies (IPROG).64
Although Filin and Pravda-info did not identify the foreign private military companies with which Far West worked, Yasenev did:
Filin and Likhvintsev do business with foreign private military companies (PMCs):
– Meteoric Tactical Solutions (South Africa)—in Angola;
– Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR Halliburton)—in Colombia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Georgia, and Iraq.
– Diligence Iraq LLC (controlled by the Kuwaiti Mohammed al-Sagar)—in Iraq.
Their cooperation with these companies began in the end of 1994 in Angola on the initiative of Victor Bout, who was involved in the shipments of Soviet-made arms to the antigovernment group UNITA in exchange for raw diamonds.(65) Apparently, Bout became interested in Likhvintsev's contacts (L. worked in Angola in 1986–87). Later, in October of 1998, Filin, Likhvintsev's wife Liudmila Rozkina (b. 1966) and Anton Surikov (at that time he worked in the Russian government) established the company Far West Ltd, with the office in Lausanne, which officially does security consulting for business ventures in countries with unstable regimes. De facto, this is a legalized form of recruiting mercenaries for PMCs.66

Furthermore, Yasenev claims that some of Far West's work with Halliburton is apparently approved by the CIA for geopolitical purposes:
In 2003–2004, Filin and Likhvintsev worked on the Georgian project, financed by KBR Halliburton, apparently, with the approval of the CIA. The project had the goal of weakening the competitors of Halliburton in (the) oil business and, in a broader context, of facilitating the geopolitical objectives of the United States in the Caucasus. The OPS man in Georgia is Audrius Butkevicius, former Lithuanian minister of defense, presently advisor to Badri Patarkatsishvili.67

http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/DrugMetaGroup2.html