Blue Herald
10
Sep
Sex, Drugs and Rockinoil
by QuestionGirl

Interior Department officials, while handling billions of dollars in oil and gas royalty payments, engaged in illegal sex with industry employees and accepted meals, drinks, ski junkets and golf outings from major oil companies, internal investigators reported Wednesday.

Interior Department Inspector General Earl Devaney’s release of three reports, which stem from a $5 million investigation dating to 2005, implicated at least 19 current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service in incestuous relationships with industry, frolics that included marijuana and cocaine use.

The reports raised new concerns about the management of programs that collect $8 billion in annual revenue from offshore and onshore mineral leases.

Devaney said that his investigators had “discovered a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” in the recently created “Royalty in Kind” program, in which the government forgoes royalties and takes a share of the pumped oil and gas for resale. Several of the program’s staffers, based in Washington and Denver, “admitted to illegal drug use as well as illicit sexual encounters.”

More at McClatchy


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