US President George Bush, seeking to deflect criticism from the controversy surrounding Halliburton contracts in Iraq, said last night he believed a subsidiary overcharged the US government for fuel deliveries to Iraq by $61 million, and expected it to be repaid.
Mr Bush said the Pentagon was investigating the overcharge after an audit found Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown & Root unit overcharged the US Army by $1.09 per gallon for nearly 57 million gallons of gasoline for Iraqi citizens.
"Their investigation will lay the facts out for everybody to see. And if there's an overcharge, like we think there is, we expect that money to be repaid," he said.
Critics of the Bush administration say Halliburton, the Houston-based oil company where Vice President Dick Cheney was chief executive, has unduly benefited from its government connections. The fuel deliveries fall under a contract awarded, without competition, to Halliburton in March.
Democrats are using Halliburton as a symbol of what they view as big business profiting from the Bush administration while regular citizens are short-changed.
Mr Howard Dean, running for the Democratic presidential nomination, told reporters in Council Bluffs, Iowa, that there should be an independent investigation of Halliburton's alleged overcharging and ties to the Bush administration.
So far the company has generated about $2 billion in business from a March contract and more than $2 billion from a logistics contract for which it supplies services ranging from delivering mail to doing laundry for US troops.
"I would like to see such an investigation," Mr Dean said. He said there was "an appearance of impropriety."