Pentagon to Investigate Boeing Jet-Leasing Bid
The Pentagon said Wednesday that it would launch a criminal probe over Boeing Co.’s controversial bid to lease 100 modified 767 jets to the Air Force amid allegations the company may have illegally obtained a rival’s proprietary information to secure the deal.
News of the investigation came on the eve of a key Senate committee hearing in which the Air Force was expected to get the final go-ahead to begin leasing the planes for $16 billion. The aircraft, currently built for commercial airlines, would be heavily modified and turned into aerial refueling tankers.
The investigation will be led by the Pentagon’s inspector general’s office and will focus on a former Pentagon official who may have improperly supplied Chicago-based Boeing with pricing information about rival Airbus.
Three congressional committees have approved the Boeing tanker deal, and the final panel, the Senate Armed Services Committee, is expected to vote on the contract today. It was unclear whether the investigation could delay the vote, but the deal has not encountered much opposition in Congress.
Still, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and several taxpayer watchdog groups have decried the Boeing deal and have pushed Congress to derail the arrangement, contending that leasing the aircraft would be far more costly than purchasing them outright and that it amounts to a taxpayer bailout of a company ailing from slow aircraft sales.
Over the weekend, the Senate Commerce Committee, chaired by McCain, released hundreds of pages of Boeing’s internal documents about the tanker deal. Much of the material, supplied by Boeing at McCain’s request, focused on the company’s efforts to win approval from the White House and Congress.
The documents also included an April 2002 e-mail exchange between two Boeing executives, one of whom said Darleen Druyun, then a top acquisition official at the Pentagon, had told Boeing about Airbus’ rival bid, which was $5 million to $17 million cheaper per unmodified plane.
The information was allegedly provided to Boeing several days after it won the competition against France-based Airbus during a routine debriefing given to both winning and losing contractors.
Druyun retired from the Pentagon in November 2002 and was hired by Boeing in January to become deputy general manager for the company’s missile defense systems business.
Critics have questioned whether she favored Boeing while negotiating the tanker deal on behalf of the Pentagon.
But Boeing executives insist that the company didn’t approach Druyun about working for them until after she retired from her government job. Druyun has not been involved in the tanker bid since joining the company, Boeing said.
“Boeing believes that we have received no proprietary information from Ms. Druyun or any other official on any subject at any time throughout the entire tanker leasing process,” Boeing spokesman Doug Kennett said.
Pentagon investigators will focus on whether Druyun’s pricing information was proprietary and therefore a violation of the Trade Secrets Act, though aerospace analysts point out that both companies list the prices of their aircraft on the Internet and are publicly available.
