Who knew that teaching economics was this lucrative?

The Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd) has been doing an excellent job of tracking a simmering corruption scandal concerning payoffs that Dick "Go F*ck Yourself" Cheney's old company, Halliburton, may have made in connection with a Nigerian gas project in the mid 1990s. The details of the project itself are the stuff of Cheney's dreams:

[German company] was contracted by [Halliburton joint venture] in 1996 to build the infrastructure required for the world's largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, built on an island in the Nigerian mangrove swamps.

The contract included leveling the approximately 385-acre site, laying about 15 miles of roads and building a nearly 800-yard-long jetty from which the liquefied natural gas would be loaded onto ships.

What Dick's company did for Nigeria then, it can do for the Everglades and Alaska now. But anyway, French investigators have discovered a suspiciously large payment to a London law firm without any clear delivery of services in return, and the money trail seems to lead back to both Nigerian officials and Halliburton executives. Or rather, ex-Halliburton executives, since the company has been distancing itself from anyone whose name pops up in the investigation. But anyway, in a sure sign that the trail is getting hotter, the euphemisms are piling up:

Last month Mr. Marembert [London law firm's spokesman] said in an interview that although Mr. Tesler [the London lawyer] had been to Nigeria only once, he had been paid $130 million by [the Halliburton joint venture] as a fee for work relating to the Bonny Island project.

He qualified Mr. Tesler's work as "economic education" of Nigerian government authorities, persuading them to accept a stake of less than 50% of the LNG plant operating company.