I just spent a mind-numbing hour in the labyrinth of Dick Cheney's finances. It's a professionally-obfuscated tangle of holding companies and trusts in which you could hide anything. The following is a somewhat rambling account written as I researched.

I googled "'blind trust' cheney" and got 593 hits. No one of the references answered my question: Did Cheney actually sell his Halliburton stock, or did he keep it and put it in a blind trust?

However, overall they tell an interesting story. During the campaign, at the same time Cheney swore on a stack of Bibles that Halliburton had never, ever, done business with Iraq (he lied), he made a vague promise to put his Halliburton stock in a blind trust. Also that summer, he sold about $5 million worth.

However, he has a problem: He holds 400,000 options for Halliburton stock (some accounts say it's as high as 1.16 million [ABC News]). The options will vest in stages through 2003, so he couldn't have sold it. One reference, called "Consortium News" (I don't know who they are) summed it up this way in August 2000:

Under the Halliburton deal, Cheney retained 400,000 unvested stock options that will “vest” in batches over the next three years. That means their value depends on Halliburton’s stock price at the time the vested options are exercised. Unlike other holdings, unvested options cannot effectively be put in a blind trust since a trustee cannot do anything with them until after they vest, ethics expert note. In other words, Cheney will be aware that his personal wealth will rise and fall along along with Halliburton's stock prices.
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So, the unvested options are a kind of multi-million-dollar leash tethering Cheney to Halliburton’s business success, at least for the next three years.

Many other references support the above.

The Center for Public Integrity has a database built from disclosure forms filed by various office-holders. This list details Cheney's (declared) holdings. Some of them are clear, a great many are anonymous investment funds and holding companies; it would take years to trace back the interests they represent. Overall, the list is interesting reading, because it makes clear that Cheney is embedded like a spider at the center of a web of businesses.

One holding that's interesting is Anadarko Petroleum. Cheney's still in the oil business. It's not clear, but likely, that Halliburton subcontracts with Anadarko.

Cheney also owns stock in Lockheed Martin, whose star is certainly on the rise these days. Also significant holdings: EDS, AT&T, and a number of electrical utilities. The latter certainly casts a fresh light on Cheney's secretive development of energy policy.

I tried approaching the subject from another angle. It was just announced that Halliburton subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root had subcontracted with Red Adair's Boots & Coots oil well fire control company to extinguish fires in Iraq. I checked the SEC filings, and discovered that since 2000, various faceless investment trusts have been buying up Boots & Coots. The latest transaction was this February. Some of these trusts are based in the Cayman Islands, a notorious money-laundering haven. At this point, the ownership of Boots & Coots is thoroughly hidden.

What's it all add up to? Beats me. Lots of suspicious connections, and the fact that Cheney's finances are so impenetrable is in itself suspicious. Why go to such heroic lengths to hide his financial interests?

All that's really clear is that something's rotten in Denmark.

--Robert