Word: ashland
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Ashland Oil Inc. Chairman Orin E. Atkins recently hung on his office wall a color portrait of Cartoonist Al Capp's renowned detective, Fearless Fosdick, Swiss-cheesed by bullet holes. Says Fosdick: "Fortunately, these are merely flesh wounds...
Atkins' fondness for the painting is easy to understand. During the past two years, Ashland has been convicted twice of violating the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 by making illegal corporate political contributions in the U.S., and also had been charged with filing misleading reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission that concealed payoffs to overseas politicos. In January, Ashland even adjourned its annual meeting for fear that the SEC would invalidate the election of directors. Last week, though, the agonies of Ashland finally may have ended. At the meeting reconvened with SEC approval at company headquarters...
...Gulf, Mobil, United Brands and Northrop, had previously admitted to making similar payoffs. The SEC's policy has been to require corporations in such cases to reveal who got their political payments and to agree not to make any more. Some have complied, others are resisting. Last week Ashland Oil Inc. argued that securities laws do not require public disclosure of the recipients of questionable payments that the company says it has made in Nigeria, Gabon, Libya and the Dominican Republic. Ashland has already supplied the names...
Total decontrol would not necessarily bring an immediate leap in prices. Major oil companies that have large stocks of cheap domestic oil might well hold down prices temporarily in order to gain a competitive advantage over independents, such as Ashland and Amerada Hess, which must import expensive foreign oil. (The independents would suffer another penalty: the allocation program that forces the majors to share some domestic oil with them would expire along with the controls.) A delay in price boosts would be especially likely if Congress votes to tax away most of the "windfall" profits that oil companies would reap...
...than a dozen U.S. companies (including Northrop) to Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign and found clues that some of the same companies had also made suspiciously large, undisclosed payments overseas, a probe of multinationals' operations has been widening. The SEC has already accused Phillips Petroleum, Ashland Oil and General Refractories of making overseas payments not properly accounted for on their books. Senator Church indicated that his subcommittee will call chiefs of other companies besides Northrop to testify. One likely target: Lockheed Aircraft. Last week Lockheed officials admitted making a $22,000 political contribution in an unnamed...