Shriveling of Pensions After Halliburton Deal
In August of 2000, the board of oil field service and equipment company Halliburton voted to grant now vice president Dick Cheney an early retirement he was ineligible for under his contract, so that he would be able to collect millions in stock and options that he would have forfeited had he resigned. Apart from any alleged corporate accounting scandals, over the past three months it has come out that as part of a corporate acquisition the Halliburton Company obtained the assets of three pension funds covering 400 employees of the Dresser-Rand Company, and then spun off the company---minus much of the workers? pensions. The end result was a $215 million profit for Halliburton, and the loss of early retirement provisions and approximately $25 million in benefits for current and former employees of the Dresser-Rand Company.
See "Shriveling of Pensions After Halliburton Deal", MARY WILLIAMS WALSH, The New York Times, September 9, 2002