Bloomberg Magazine has just published a bombshell list of alleged criminal acts and ethical violations that include ignoring a U.S. trade ban barring American companies from selling materials to Iran. Major GOP political donors and founders of the Tea Party and Americans For Prosperity, the US government has been investigating one of Koch’s European companies for engineering illegal sales to Iran.

On Aug. 14, 2008, investigators from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security met with George Bentu, who had worked as a sales engineer from 2001 to 2007 for Koch-Glitsch in Germany, Bentu says. In a four-hour interview at the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt, the officials asked about documents showing details of the company’s trades with Iran, he says.
Legal Sidestep

Homeland Security spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez declined to comment.

Internal company records show that Koch Industries used its foreign subsidiary to sidestep a U.S. trade ban barring American companies from selling materials to Iran. Koch-Glitsch offices in Germany and Italy continued selling to Iran until as recently as 2007, the records show.

The company’s products helped build a methanol plant for Zagros Petrochemical Co., a unit of Iran’s state-owned National Iranian Petrochemical Co., the documents show. The facility, in the coastal city of Bandar Assaluyeh, is now the largest methanol plant in the world, according to IHS Inc., an Englewood, Colorado-based provider of chemicals, energy and economic data.

Just as interesting is the apparent attempts by Koch Industries to suppress and discredit the article even before it was published. Salon reports the spin machine began working fast and furiously on preemptive damage control.

Here’s a rule of thumb about public relations: When P.R. pros begin furiously spinning a story before it has even come out, there’s a pretty good chance the story is going to be damaging to the reputation of said P.R. pros’ bosses.

And that’s exactly what we’re seeing right now, as an anonymous person or persons in the orbit of the billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch try to discredit a forthcoming story in Bloomberg Markets magazine.

Based on the prebuttal items appearing this week in the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, and U.S. News and World Report, the Bloomberg story focuses on alleged malfeasance and/or fraud and/or bad behavior by the conglomerate Koch Industries.

One of those episodes apparently involves bribery by a Koch subsidiary in France, according to the piece by Washington Examiner editorial page editor Mark Tapscott. He reports that “Bloomberg reporters have been trolling among former Koch employees overseas in search of disaffected voices willing to talk,” but Tapscott suspects the story may be animated by bias against the Tea Party. And he notes that, “Koch USA officials say they were as surprised and angered as anybody else when they were first apprised of the bribery allegations, and moved as quickly as possible to get to the bottom of the situation and fix it.”

All three of the prebuttal stories cite an unnamed source who was interviewed for the Bloomberg story; it’s not clear if that same source spoke with all three publications. The Examiner describes the source as a former government official.

Their concern may be with good reason because the bribery charges may be the smoking gun necessary to get the juices flowing at the Justice Department.