Ali Ghalambor is an endowed chair in the Petroleum Engineering department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
He is also a globe-trotting consultant who has figured out that if you charge your travel to your university as well as to the people for whom you’re consulting, you make double what you’d have made if… if you hadn’t done that.
Ghalambor has also figured out that for high-demand oilmen, a university is really just a business address, a launching pad, an office away from the office. “Ghalambor … often conducted outside consulting or contract work during his ULL working hours and responsibilities.”
You see the synergy here between the conflict of commitment and the double dipping. He didn’t tell the university that his travel was not scholarly but commercial. So the university gave him scholarly travel funds, and of course the commercial entity involved paid his consultancy and travel expenses.
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No, it’s not earth-shattering. Ghalambor is just a guy playing the angles. What could be exploited in his work setting he exploited. What corruption was possible, he engaged in. He didn’t do anything dramatic or anything out of whack with the basic principles of corruption. He was simply corrupt in the ways available given his situation.
… [H]undreds of invoices, letters, itineraries, travel requests and expense reports… indicate… tens of thousands of dollars were paid to Ghalambor for trips ranging from Wyoming to Kazakhstan [and] that he may have double-billed the university and the institutions or businesses he visited.
ULL administrators had questioned some of Ghalambor’s travel and expenses, especially to Ghalambor’s native country Iran, at least as far back as December 2004, according to letters received by The Advocate through former and current ULL petroleum engineering department employees.
The internal audit reported that from 2006 to 2009 Ghalambor received $42,280 from ULL “while conducting activities that appear to be outside of his working hours or responsibilities.”
He also claimed $84,117 from ULL for travel expenses while accepting travel reimbursements for possibly the same expenses “from companies and organizations he provided services to as part of his outside activities,” the report states.
He also sometimes converted state-contracted airfare to first class that was reimbursed by other companies or organizations, according to the report.
Moving this money here and that money there to shift from a shabby state-contracted seat to first-class… Again, nothing outside the rule book… Plain old vanilla graft.