WASHINGTON – New York City’s comptroller has begun to enlist other large institutional investors in Halliburton to pressure the company to end its business with Iran.

William Thompson controls $42 million invested in the company’s stock for the pension funds of the New York City fire and police departments. He said last week that he had contacted the treasurer of North Carolina and the California state employees pension fund to gain support for his plan to introduce a resolution at Halliburton’s annual shareholder meeting in May demanding a full accounting of the company’s business dealings with Iran. Vice President Cheney ran Halliburton between 1995 and 2000.

In an interview last week, Mr. Thompson said the deal Halliburton forged to help develop the South Pars oil and gas field was “outrageous.”

“It is astonishing. The federal government is pushing European companies to divest in Iran, meanwhile an American-based company is acquiring new and additional contracts,” Mr. Thompson said.

On January 11, Iranian state television announced that Halliburton Products & Services Limited, along with the Oriental Kish Company, had won a $310 million contract to develop sectors 9 and 10 of the South Pars oil and gas field. Oriental Kish Company is partially owned by the family of Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former Iranian president who in the past has threatened to incinerate Israel with nuclear weapons.

Oriental Kish’s main shareholder is Cyrus Nasseri, who according to the Iranian Student News Agency is also a consultant to the Iranian nuclear program, which the White House has said is geared toward developing nuclear weapons.

Since 2002, Mr. Thompson has urged other major investors in Halliburton to support a shareholder resolution demanding a full and public accounting of the company’s business dealings in Iran, a country the State Department has long determined was the world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism. Last year, the company finally released a report on their Iranian business, but Mr. Thompson’s office told the Sun last week that the report failed to address the risk to American investors from Halliburton’s dealings in the Islamic Republic.

The resolution Mr. Thompson plans to offer in May requests that the company’s board of directors “establish a committee of the Board to review Halliburton’s operations in Iran with a particular reference to potential financial and reputational risks incurred by the company by such operations.”

The supporting statement says, “We believe that Halliburton’s use of its Cayman Island subsidiary to establish operations in Tehran violates the spirit, if not the letter of the law. It also exposes the company to the prospect of negative publicity, public protests, and a loss of consumer confidence, all of which can have a negative impact on shareholder value.”

Last Thursday, Mr. Cheney said on the Don Imus radio program that Israel may decide to launch a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities if it felt the regime posed a grave enough threat.

“If, in fact, the Israelis became convinced the Iranians had a significant nuclear capability, given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards,” the vice president said.

Iranian officials responded over the weekend. A Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza Asefi, said yesterday the remarks from Mr. Cheney proved “the Zionist lobby is strong in the United States.”

Mr. Thompson said the new deal to develop the South Pars oil and gas field for Halliburton was not only a blow to American foreign policy, but also a risk to the shareholders of the company. “With Halliburton under investigation by the U.S. attorney in Houston, I just think this is outrageous,” he said. “When there is an investigation into Halliburton into these practices, to use these legislative loop holes, they have not even tried to disguise this practice.”

Mr. Thompson made headlines in 2004 when he helped a CBS “60 Minutes” investigation into Halliburton Products & Services Limited that reported the company maintained offices in Tehran. “When you look at the situation with Halliburton, it was not even well disguised. The offshore site was merely a mail drop, their subsidiaries in Dubai share offices with Halliburton. This is another example of Halliburton ignoring the law,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Halliburton, Beverly Scippa, said in response to the allegations: “Halliburton’s business is clearly permissible under applicable U.S. laws and regulations. If Congress decides to change the laws and provisions, Halliburton will, of course, comply. Also, we are in the service business not the foreign policy business. We have followed and will continue to follow applicable laws.”