Crikey's Michael Pascoe has had a look at Firepower's substantiative documentation and found it, shall we say, lacking a little.

Instead of the stack of documents 30 centimetres thick indicated by CEO John Finnin, it was a much thinner file and most of it was irrelevant.

The promised tests by DEKRA and San Antonio’s Southwest Research Institute weren’t about fuel efficiency and emissions, just showing Firepower’s additives didn’t change the fuel’s ratings, i.e. fuel with the additive still met engine specifications.

Which left three making fuel efficiency claims. Firepower would only allow the documents to be sighted, not copied or taken away. (Apparently Firepower is concerned that its competitors would copy the documents and change the name to their own – that’s the sort of business this magic fuel pill is.)

Meanwhile, over at the SMH Gerard Ryle has, apart from finding out the same stuff as Crikey, been doing some digging into that George Teleman bloke I mentioned two weeks back. It turns out that Teleman did more than act on Equest's behalf to set up Firepower's Romanian deals. He was, in fact, the 90% owner of Firepower Romania, the other 10% owned from Australia. He was also, Ryle learned from the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism, a close relative of a couple of Ceaucescus.

Teleman also was a financial consultant to Regal, the company headed by the German Halliburton (now Firepower) chiefl Regal, Halliburton and Timmin's (the bloke who was putting Australian money into Regal) Canadian company failed to get control of the privatisation of Romanian petroleum.

Given the level of nepotism at play here you have to wonder at how high a level this activity is being co-ordinated. It now appears likely that the Halliburton chief was also acting as a "front". If so Note could be acting for other powers than the Russian mob. So could Tinnis. The fact that after such chessmanship these gentlemen became the head honchos of Firepower suggests to me that there has been a stageplay under way.

The name Dick Cheney springs to mind.

If,as the Russians thought, Regal was funding the sabotage of the the gas pipeline to Romania, now apparently an opening move in a Halliburton-partnered national takeover, then you're probably looking at a blatant example of Cheney manipulating local resources to maximise his profits.

Would such a code of ethics have been applied to Australia? Perhaps somebody should ask Cheney when he comes to Australia in a couple of weeks to discuss Asian security and the War On Terror.