Haliburton Takes The Money And Runs

To avoid protests at their annual shareholder's meeting, Haliburton has gone off and hid in Oklahoma where they can count their record $2.4 billion from last year.

(AP)Halliburton Co. says it moved its meeting to this company town of 22,500 to honor its southern Oklahoma roots. The company's critics accuse it of running to a prairie outpost to hide.

"They're relocating to a city where they don't actually have to be accountable to their own shareholders," said Maureen Haver, spokeswoman for the Houston Global Awareness Collective and one of 15 protesters arrested at Halliburton's meeting last year. "They're going to a town they have in their pocket."

While Haliburton isn't the first to move it's shareholder's meeting, it is becoming a trend of big businesses. Why? One member of the Teamsters has his opinion.

Joseph Horgan, a representative for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, came to Tulsa to represent the union's concerns and ended up riding out a tornado warning in a parking garage. Days later, he followed Pfizer to Lincoln.

Both meetings, he said, were convened far from concentrations of active shareholders, limiting participation by those with beefs about high executive pay and other business practices.