Pentagon warns British firms
David Gow
Saturday March 27, 2004
The Guardian
The Pentagon yesterday warned British firms winning contracts under its $18.4bn (£10bn) Iraqi reconstruction programme that they would be thrown out if they failed to give a minimum 10% of the work to US small businesses.
Mark Lumer, assistant deputy secretary of the US army, said there could be grounds for default if prime contractors failed to meet that criterion. Ideally, the US would like 23% of sub-contracting work handed to American businesses.
"We will be enforcing the terms and clauses of these contracts very strictly," he told a London seminar on federal acquisition rules (FAR) organised by UK Trade & Investment, the government agency.
Mr Lumer and David Nash, the retired US rear admiral running the coalition provisional authority's programme management office (PMO), in Baghdad, said all firms operating in Iraq would have to train Iraqis and offer them senior positions. Their comments came as Parsons, a Pasadena-based company, confirmed it had won a $500m contract for the construction and renovation of public buildings in Iraq.
With one $750m contract for security and justice work left to be awarded, Mr Nash said $10bn of construction and related work would have been let by July 1 - the day a provisional Iraqi government takes over from the CPA run by Paul Bremer.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1179286,00.html
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