Item 4. Changes in Registrant's Certifying Accountant
(a) On August 28, 2001, Harken Energy Corporation (the "Company") dismissed 
Arthur Andersen LLP ("Arthur Andersen") as the Company's independent accountants. The Company has engaged Ernst and Young LLP ("Ernst & Young") as its new independent accountants effective immediately. The decision to change the Company's independent accountants was made by the Company's Audit Committee of the Board of Directors.
(b) Arthur Andersen's reports on the Company's consolidated financial statements for the years ended December 31, 2000 and 1999 did not contain an adverse opinion or disclaimer of opinion, nor were such reports qualified or modified as to uncertainty, audit scope, or accounting principles.
(c) During the two years ended December 31, 2000 and the subsequent interim period preceding the decision to change independent accountants, there were no disagreements with Arthur Andersen on any matters of accounting principles or practices, financial statement disclosure, or auditing scope or procedure, which disagreement(s), if not resolved to the satisfaction of Arthur Andersen, would have caused the former accountant to make a reference to the subject matter of the disagreement(s) in connection with its reports covering such periods.
(d) During the two years ended December 31, 2000 and the subsequent interim period preceding the decision to change independent accountants, there were no "reportable events" (hereinafter defined) requiring disclosure pursuant to Item 304 (a) (1) (v) of Regulation S-K. As used herein, the term "reportable events" means any of the items listed in paragraphs (a) (1) (v) (A) - (D) of Item 304 of Regulation S-K.
(e) Effective September 5, 2001, the Company engaged Ernst & Young as its independent accountants. During the two years ended December 31, 2000 and the subsequent interim period preceding the decision to change independent accountants, neither the Company nor anyone on its behalf consulted Ernst & Young regarding either the application of accounting principles to a specified transaction, either completed or proposed, or the type of audit opinion that might be rendered on the Company's consolidated financial statements, nor has Ernst & Young provided to the Company a written report or oral advice regarding such principles or audit opinion.
(f) The Company has requested that Arthur Andersen furnish it with a letter addressed to the Securities and Exchange Commission stating whether or not it agrees with the above statements. A copy of the letter from Arthur Andersen dated August 31, 2001 is filed as Exhibit 16.1 to this Form 8-K.
HARKEN ENERGY CORP.
HARKEN ENERGY CORP's SEC filings By Name
Neil Bush
Silverado Savings and Loan Executive:
O, Brother! Where Art Thou?
"In 1990, Bush paid a $50,000 fine and was banned from banking activities for his role in taking down Silverado, which actually cost taxpayers $1.3 billion. A Resolution Trust Corporation Suit against Bush and other officers of Silverado was settled in 1991 for $26.5 million. And the fine wasn't exactly paid by Neil Bush. A Republican fundraiser set up a fund to help defer costs Neil incurred in his S&L dealings. Friends and relatives contributed -- but not then-President and Barbara Bush, which would have been unseemly.
...Bush wasn't just an average S&L exec drawing a big salary and recklessly pushing a federally insured institution beyond its lending limits. As a director of a failing thrift in Denver, Bush voted to approve $100 million in what were ultimately bad loans to two of his business partners. And in voting for the loans, he failed to inform fellow board members at Silverado Savings & Loan that the loan applicants were his business partners. Federal banking regulators later followed the trail of defaulted loans to Neil Bush oil ventures, in particular JNB International, an oil and gas exploration company awarded drilling concessions in Argentina -- despite its complete lack of experience in international oil and gas drilling. It probably helped that the Bush family had cultivated close ties with the fabulously corrupt Carlos Menem, former president of Argentina.
When JNB's rights and obligations were assumed by other investors, Neil tried to persuade another American oil and gas exploration company, Plains Resources, to invest in Argentina. Plains wasn't buying. But it was hiring, and picked up Neil as a consultant for its Argentine market -- because, as Plains executive Carlos Garibaldi told The New York Times' Jeff Gerth in 1992, Neil had "traveled [in Argentina] and played tennis with President Menem." Plains President J. Patrick Collins told Gerth at the time that Neil Bush "bent over backwards not to trade on his name."
That claim was hard to make in 1993, when Neil, Marvin, James Baker III, John Sununu, and Thomas Kelly (who had served as director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War) joined President Bush on a trip to Kuwait. Three months out of office, the elder Bush was traveling on a Kuwait Airlines flight to accept an honorary degree from the country's university and its highest honor from its leader: Emir Sheikh Jabir al-Ahmad al-Sabah. The rest of the Bush entourage was following along to exploit the market in a country that considered the ex-president its savior. Former Secretary of State Baker was doing deals for Enron (the Houston-based energy-related company and contributor to Bush the Elder and later a $525,000 donor to George W. Bush's two gubernatorial races in Texas). Marvin was representing U.S. defense firms selling electronic fences to the Kuwaiti Defense Ministry. And Neil was selling anti-pollution equipment to Kuwaiti oil contractors.
There is "no conflict of interest. ... We're just capitalizing on whatever good feelings exist," an executive from the company Neil Bush represented later told Seymour Hersh, who laid out the embarrassing story on the pages of The New Yorker in September 1993. Neil, according to Hersh, later returned to Kuwait and set up shop in the International Hotel in Kuwait City, where he tried to secure a management contract with Kuwait's Ministry of Electricity and Water. Neil's deal included foreign and Kuwaiti members of the Enron consortium, and would have had the Kuwaiti government paying a management fee to a Kuwaiti company that was owned in part by a private company set up in the Caribbean or some other tax haven. "The offshore firm would have various owners, in Europe and elsewhere, one of which would be a company in which Neil Bush had an interest," The New Yorker reported. The scheme was ingenious, a financial analyst told Hersh."If you looked at one of the contracts, how in the hell would you know that Bush was in it?" The whole deal was as unsavory and unpardonable as a round of golf with Hillary Clinton sibling Huey Rodham.
Jeb missed that junket, but the current governor of Florida isn't above taking the family name abroad to make a buck. In 1989, Bush and his wife traveled to Nigeria with a executives of M&W Pump, a Florida-based company that had been selling agricultural pumps to Nigeria. Jeb and Columba Bush were received by Nigerian President Ibrahim Babangida and celebrated by tens of thousands of Nigerians who turned out to see the son of the U.S. president. President Babangida expressed his interest in visiting the White House -- a request Jeb promised to pass along to his father -- and by 1992 the Florida pump company had secured $74 million in financing from the Export-Import Bank of the United States. It was by far the largest Ex-Im deal M&W had ever done in Nigeria -- a country Ex-Im loan officers considered a bad risk. "I didn't get paid for the Nigeria business," Bush told The Palm Beach Post in 1994. "I have not made a dime on business with Nigeria." Yet the Post found tax records that revealed Bush had earned at least $300,000 through his association with the owner of the same company for which he had done a pro-bono sales trip to Nigeria. Bush-El, a 50-50 partnership with the owner of M&W, paid Bush at least $300,000 for his participation in a separate venture, marketing agricultural hand pumps. Why would Bush suddenly find himself involved with a company selling agricultural hand pumps around the world? the Post asked. "I know how to sell things," responded Bush. "I know international sales. I know how to get people to put together tenders because I financed a lot of them when I was working at Texas Commerce Bank."
Jeb Bush
Ideon Corporation
Jeb Bush - Board of Directors
"Kahn in early 1995 even wrote the former president: "First let me tell you how happy we are to have your son, Jeb, on our board of directors. . . . He is a great asset to the team."
Then there was the paycheck. Ideon paid directors a whopping $50,000 a year, plus $2,000 per meeting and $500 per telephone conference. That was the largest sum paid to directors of any major public company in Jacksonville, and possibly in all of Florida.
What's not to like? Everything, it turns out. Ideon already was in trouble when Bush joined the board in January 1995.
By 1996, Kahn was out. Ideon was then sold to CUC International. Ideon's directors faced lawsuits claiming stock manipulation. Now, more than two years later, Cendant -- the successor company to CUC -- is struggling to recover after discovering years of accounting fraud attributed, in part, to CUC's purchase of Ideon.
Politically, the Ideon aftermath worries the Bush campaign. In fact, Bush assembled a 15-page Ideon statement and visited major Florida newspapers to defend his role.
Kahn at first had grandiose plans for a quirky array of new services -- selling credit card perks for golfers, a "Family Protection Network" membership club to help find missing children and a line of Vatican-approved art objects. The services were never fully tested. They flopped and Ideon began gushing red ink.
Some of Kahn's ideas were a stretch. He wanted the pope's blessing to introduce a Catholic credit card. He also wasted a lot of company funds. Kahn once bought $10,000 place mats for the company jet. He hired consultants like convicted Wall Street felon Martin Siegel.
Bush said he was angry when he heard about Siegel. "I couldn't believe it," he said.
Despite a second-quarter 1995 loss of $46.7-million, Bush said Ideon's board initially accepted Kahn's free-spending ways. The directors counted on revenue growth. They did demand Siegel be fired. Bush said he pushed to dismiss Kahn and sell the company.
But lawsuits against Ideon directors, as well as the company's own regulatory filings, paint a different picture. As directors, Bush and his Republican fund-raiser friend Thomas Petway sat on Ideon's audit committee, the watchdog of financial and management integrity. Many of Bush's fellow outside directors -- who were supposed to represent shareholder interests -- had cut cozy business deals with Ideon. In some cases, they got six-figure consulting fees on top of their directors pay.
..By August 1996, Ideon was sold for $375-million to CUC. The sale included indemnification for directors against lawsuits. Good news, considering the lawsuits charge Ideon and its directors with stock manipulation. The cases were settled early this year for $15-million. Bush and the other directors paid nothing.
Kahn denied that board members were in the dark about company spending. "I was not alone," he told Business Week magazine last year. "The board knew about everything. . . . They set me up for being the fall guy, not that I'm without sin. I was hung out to dry."
[end of partial transcript]
A Pathological Probe of A Pool of Pervasive Perversion - By Abraham J. Briloff, Ph.D., CPA - Emanuel Saxe Distinugished Professor Emeritus - Baruch College, New York.
"On August 28, 1998, Arthur Andersen & Co. (“AA”) rendered its “Report to the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors of Cendant Corporation” reporting on its forensic audit of CUC International, Inc., in the wake of disclosures in mid-April that accounting irregularities had been discovered at CUC (which merged in December 1997, with HFS to form Cendant)."
Let's roll.