and corruption in Alaska
Connecting Veco's bribery to the oil companies: BP and ConocoPhillips may think they have found plausible deniability in the daylight between themselves and Veco today, but that story won't sell if you back up ten years and show the jurors that Veco, BP and ARCO all delivered illegal checks to bribe a former Governor Knowles on or about the same day.
Click Here to download the file Ray Metcalfe compiled and sent to the Office of Public Integrity in the US Justice Department in June of 2005.
It is the evidence that, the APOC, Alaska's State Troopers, Alaska's Attorney General, and 100% of Alaska's Legislators refused to acknowledge until the FBI raided their legislative offices on August 31, 2006.
Although I believe Veco and the oil companies began bribing Alaska’s elected officials in 1981, with the passage of legislation known as ELF, or the “Economic Limit Factor,” it’s easy to demonstrate a persuasive case that ARCO, BP, and Veco were paying bribes to Governor Knowles in 1996.
For a brief time, in 1996, it was legal for corporations to make contributions to political parties in unlimited amounts. The oil companies, the Democratic Party and Tony Knowles, decided to use that legal loophole for a purpose that was not legal. While it was legal for the corporations to make large contributions to the Democratic Party at the time, it was not legal to give the money to a political party with the agreement that the money be passed on for a purpose the corporations could not have legally contributed to without the middleman.
Money laundering and bribery; that’s what the oil companies did in1996. They used a willing Democratic Party to launder money for the personal use of Tony Knowles. Involving a middleman didn’t make it legal. Delivery and acceptance of the money by Tony Knowles for his personal use made it bribery.
In recent statements, all three oil companies denied knowing anything about Veco’s bribery. From the evidence presented thus far in the trials of Pete Kott and Vic Kohring, it’s conceivable that the North Slope producers could argue their way off the hook claiming they knew nothing of Veco’s conduct. They would argue that those fat no bid exclusive contracts they gave Veco for years and years had nothing to do with the fact that Veco spent decades bribing Alaska’s legislators to save the Producers from paying a fair price for Alaska’s oil.
One need look on further back than 1996, to the Knowles administration, to find a clear demonstration that ARCO and British Petroleum were, at one time willing participants in a money laundering scheme, writing big checks directly to an account they knew to be controlled by and for the personal use of Governor Tony Knowles. If you clicked on the above link, you saw that Alaska’s oil producers were much bolder when Knowles was Governor. Back then, they didn’t launder all of their checks through Veco. If you clicked the link, you saw that BP, Arco, and Veco wrote a total of $59,000 in checks intended for Tony’s personal use to laundered through the “Governor’s Fund.”
Paid for by Ray Metcalfe For Ethics in Government, PO Box 233809, Anchorage Alaska, 99523
Ray Metcalfe is a Candidate for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Ted Stevens.
"There were clear bribery laws that were being broken here. I took it to the state troopers, I took it to the district attorney, I took it to David Marquez, who was the attorney general, I took it to APOC. I took it to every single agency the state of Alaska has that's responsible for enforcing the law. 100 percent of them, to the man, said no."
Ray Metcalfe
