WASHINGTON, 14 November 2007 — At a time when Americans are reeling from the price of gasoline — an oil muckraking scandal up in Alaska that might help explain things.

Today, Alaska lawmakers are poised to increase taxes on oil production. And, as crude prices near $100 a barrel, the state is still reeling from an ongoing bribery scandal involving manipulation of the tax scheme that passed last year.

Details of the tax rewrite are still being negotiated in the final days of a special legislative session that is due to end on Nov. 16.

Governor Sarah Palin, who called lawmakers back to the capitol in Juneau to rewrite the tax bill that she said was hopelessly tainted by scandal, expects an acceptable result by then, a spokeswoman said last week.

Alaska’s state Capitol is a much different place these days since the building that was raided by the FBI in August 2006. Many of the Alaskan Republican legislators there had collected thousands of dollars from VECO Corp., then the state’s biggest oil services company, in contributions over the years. A subject they are obviously sensitive about nowadays. Since then, senators and state employees have watched former colleagues convicted of corruption and headed to federal prison.

The FBI sting taped an oil-services company executive with hundred-dollar bills in his front pocket for ease of access when lawmakers turned up with their hands out. The oil-services company executive gave a bravura performance before the pinhole camera that federal agents installed opposite his favorite chair.

The video footage was used as evidence in the lawmaker’s September trial, one of several crowding the docket of the federal court, where it was revealed that at least one sitting legislator has worked with the FBI in its investigation, and a well-known lobbyist was revealed to have been wearing a hidden camera.

On another tape, Pete Kott, the former Republican speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives, crowed as he described beating back a tax bill opposed by oil companies. “I had to cheat, steal, beg, borrow and lie,” Kott said. “Exxon’s happy. BP’s happy. I’ll sell my soul to the devil.”

“Well, that will stay in this room,” one lobbyist said.

It did not, of course. The federal probe has produced four indictments, three convictions, three guilty pleas and a rapt audience keen to see how high into Alaska’s political hierarchy the rot reaches.