A BRITISH-BASED subsidiary of Halliburton, the American defence company with close links to the Bush administration, is to be awarded a contract to oversee the building of Britain’s two new £4 billion Royal Navy aircraft carriers.

The deal will ignite concerns among Labour backbenchers that American firms close to the White House are being favoured.

Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, is a former chief executive of Halliburton. The company has been mired in controversy over its contracts to support American forces in Iraq and help rebuild the war-torn country. Last week Swiss investigators froze bank accounts as part of an investigation into alleged bribery involving Halliburton in Nigeria.

The Ministry of Defence was supposed to make a “fast track” announcement last week but Lord Bach, the defence procurement minister, has been forced to try to seek assurances from Halliburton that work will not be lost from the Rosyth dockyard. Rosyth is close to Gordon Brown’s Dunfermline East constituency.

The “physical integrator” contract involves overseeing an alliance of BAE Systems and Thales, which will build the two super-carriers.

Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), the British-based Halliburton subsidiary which has won the contract, has previously hinted that the carriers should be built at Nigg, a mothballed site off the Scottish mainland. Rosyth had previously expected to get a big share of the work.

The unions have expressed concern at the threat to Rosyth, but sources close to Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, insist it will not be up to KBR to decide where the work goes.

Last night Rachel Squire, the Labour MP for Dunfermline West, said she would oppose any involvement of Halliburton that might jeopardise work going to Rosyth She said: “This is a company with well-publicised problems in the United States. It also does not have a very good record with contracts in the past and yet here is the MoD waving it through. I cannot understand it.

“I will never forgive the Tories for giving Devonport (Plymouth) rather than Rosyth the big submarine contract in 1993 for political reasons — and I cannot understand why the recommendation now is that Halliburton is again involved.”

However, that would seem to prejudge the MoD’s internal review of shipyards which is due to report soon.

There is also a concern over KBR’s track record in MoD contract work, in particular cost overruns on submarine refits at Plymouth in a dockyard half-owned by Halliburton.

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