Word: ashland
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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...
Assets Diverted. Before the meeting, however, Ashland signed a consent decree admitting to no guilt but promising, in effect, not to make illegal political donations in the future. It also bared many secrets. In June the company submitted a 539-page report, prepared by a special committee of the board, containing exhaustive information on how Ashland executives had managed to divert corporate assets into an $800,000 U.S. political slush fund that was kept hidden in a safe. The report also indicated that from 1967 to 1972 a CIA operative was on Ashland's payroll, and that...
...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...