Halliburton Units Seek Chapter 11 Protection
Halliburton Co. said Tuesday that two of its units had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as part of a long-awaited, $4.3-billion settlement of hundreds of thousands of asbestos claims against the company.
Houston-based Halliburton, once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, is not included in the bankruptcy filings, nor are its energy services group and the government services unit, which is providing support services to the U.S. military in Iraq.
The units in the prepackaged bankruptcy filings in a Pittsburgh court are DII Industries and engineering unit Kellogg Brown & Root. They will continue normal operations while in Chapter 11.
The bulk of the claims came from employees who worked on industrial furnaces made by DII before Halliburton’s purchase of the company in the late 1990s when Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton.
The bankruptcy filings have been expected for a year as Halliburton, the No. 2 oilfield services company in the world, negotiated details of a plan to settle hundreds of thousands of claims by workers who say they were injured by cancer-causing asbestos and silica.
The deal, if approved by the Bankruptcy Court, should absolve Halliburton of all existing and future claims.
Last week, Halliburton said that 97% of the 370,000 asbestos claimants and 99% of the 21,000 silica claimants voted to accept the proposed bankruptcy plan, paving the way for Tuesday’s filing. Halliburton will pay $2.78 billion in cash and contribute 59.5 million shares of its stock, currently worth about $1.5 billion, to a trust fund to compensate all current and future victims.
