Halliburton is back in the spotlight, and once again, in an uncomfortable way.

In recent years, the giant energy services company has found itself under scrutiny over allegations that it performed shoddy, overpriced work for the United States military in Iraq, bribed Nigerian officials to win energy contracts and did brisk business with Iran at time when it faced sanctions.

On Thursday, a government investigation panel said that Halliburton might have played an important role in the April explosion of the Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico by supplying cement that the company knew was unstable to BP, which used it to seal the well. Halliburton has repeatedly blamed BP, the owner of the well, of failing to test the cement and making other errors that led to the accident, which killed 11 people and spewed millions of barrels of crude oil into the gulf.

“Halliburton has a history of walking on the energy high beam without a net,” said Chris Ruppel, managing director of capital markets at Execution Noble, an international investment bank. “Because they have been very aggressive, working on very high-profile types of projects, when anything goes wrong, they will be front and center.”

The company, which was led by former Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995 to 2000, has drawn repeated fire for some of its past actions, mostly involving its Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary, which it finished selling in 2007. Last year, for example, Halliburton and KBR agreed to pay $579 million to settle charges brought by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with bribes that KBR had paid to top Nigerian officials over a decade. The companies still face criminal liability in Nigeria over the episode, which involved contracts to build a liquefied natural gas complex.