Feds List Favors Stevens Allegedly Did For Oil FirmFederal prosecutors have never tried to say Sen. Ted Stevens provided any illegal favors to VECO, the Alaska-based oil and gas company that helped renovate his home.
Rather, the senator’s indictment charges only that he accepted gifts from the company and failed to disclose them in Senate financial reports.
But in new court filings last night, the feds laid out evidence from wiretaps and seized emails to show in detail some favors Stevens allegedly did for the company. Prosecutors made the disclosure in a motion seeking to introduce the information at Stevens’ trial set for September.
One of those alleged favors concerns a proposed pipeline that VECO hoped the state and federal governments would approve. In a phone conversation tapped by federal agents in 2006, Stevens told Bill Allen, the head of VECO, that the senator would try to smooth out the politics — specifically resistance on the state level — involved in the permit approval process.
I’ve been working with [Stevens’ son] and, uh, we’re trying to see
what we can do about this [State Senator’s] hearing. Uh, I’m gonna try to see if I can get some bigwigs from back here to go up there and say, “Look, uh, you just gotta make up your mind, you gotta get this done. There’s no politics in it, there’s necessity in it for the
Federal government.” We’ll see if I can get that done.
A few days after Stevens traveled to Alaska to push state lawmakers to approve the project, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a report also urging state officials to approve the pipeline.
Nevertheless, the pipeline project has not materialized.
Another alleged favor came in 1999, when Allen sought Stevens’ help securing a grant from the National Science Foundation. Allen wrote a letter to Stevens and included some proposed wording Allen hoped could be inserted into some legislation, prosecutors said.
In early 2000, the foundation granted a VECO subsidiary a contract valued at $27 million, according to court papers.
In another case, VECO sought Stevens help with a deal the company was forging in Russia. In order for VECO to get a large energy-services contract with the Russian government, some Russian workers needed training on how to use American equipment, the motion said.
The company sought Stevens’ assistance in getting federal funding for the worker training in both 1999 and 2004. Federal prosecutors found an email from 2004 from a VECO executive referring to money Stevens had secured:
Bill got Ted to fund this a few years ago. Bill went back to Ted Stevens over the weekend to ask about more money. Ted found $3 million that is available now. Stevens [s]taff person is going to call [an oil company executive] next week to make the money
available so that Exxon can get some good publicity.
Another incident prosecutors point to involves VECO’s request for assistant with Pakistan. Pakistan owned money to VECO for a pipeline project and after Allen asked Stevens for help in the matter, Stevens wrote a letter to the president of the World Bank Group urging him to help resolve the financial dispute between VECO and Pakistan. The debt was paid soon afterward.
