Oil and government scandal involves Denver office

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Story By: Tom Costello, NBC News
Source: NBC

Washington, D.C. Published 2 hour(s) ago ...

A new Inspector General report alleges that more than a dozen government employees, many in Denver, accepted gifts from oil company executives including meals, golf and ski trips and tickets to football and baseball games. The report also alleges that on several occasions government employees drank, used drugs and had sex with each other and oil company employees. The report charges that a supervisor improperly steered business to his own outside consulting firm while the agency's associate director also steered business to a recently retired special assistant. That special assistant now faces up to five years in prison after pleading guilty in August to a felony conflict-of-interest charge.

One government watchdog organization isn't surprised. Danielle Brian, Project on Government Oversight said, "There have been rumors for months if not years of really inappropriate conduct between the people in this particular office at the Department of Interior and the oil industry that they're supposed to be those investigated have already left the Interior Department. And the Justice Department has charge overseeing."

http://www.koaa.com/aaaa_top_stories/x1238457318/Oil-and-government-scandal-involves-Denver-office

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1. Sex 'n drugs 'n minerals management (Seattle PI blogs)

... And amid all the wink-wink-nudge-nudge, don't fail to notice that the hanky-panky after hours was just window dressing on what was going on right in the MMS offices in Denver ... One bureaucrat has already pleaded guilty, but federal prosecutors declined to go after two higher-ranking officials.

This unit was set up a few years ago to simplify life for the oil companies. Its employees would take delivery of oil in payment of oil companies' royatly payments for drilling on federal offshore reserves. Apparently the MMS employees thought they were above federal ethics rules because they were moving in the world of oil-industry wheeler-dealers, and supervisors remained "calculatedly ignorant" of rules forbidding awarding of government contracts to recently retired friends from within the agency, Devaney reported ...

Devaney's office's work churned up more than 470,000 pages of investigative documents ... But if you can't find time to read all that, I do recommend his four-page letter transmitting the findings to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, which notes that some officials: escaped potential administrative action by departing from federal service, with the usual celebratory send-offs that allegedly highlighted the impeccable service these individuals had given to the Federal Government. Our reports belie this notion ...

This one's a big enough stinker that even U.S. Rep. Don Young, R-Big Oil, is saying they done bad ...

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/environment/archives/148456.asp