You’ve got to admire Halliburton’s moxie. No one likes the company anyway, so brand perception be damned—the oil and engineering services giant is relocating its CEO to Dubai in order to pursue more Middle East business. Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, blasted the impending move as “an insult to the U.S. soldiers and taxpayers who paid the tab for their no-bid contracts and endured their overcharges for all these years.” Hearings on tax implications of the move could begin in the House. (KBR, a military-services unit that Halliburton is spinning off, is the Pentagon’s largest contractor in Iraq, and its billing practices have come under scrutiny.) It just goes to show: If you don’t care about your public image, you can pretty much do what you like. Just ask Dick Cheney, who, by the way, ran Halliburton from 1995 until 2000.

—Posted by David Gianatasio