Clinton Cash (19 page)

One longtime Clinton benefactor is businessman Gilbert Chagoury, who has also been implicated in corruption and bribery in Nigeria. Born in Lagos, Chagoury comes from a Lebanese family and has dual citizenship in Lebanon and the United Kingdom. He built a financial empire in Nigeria with the help of General Sani Abacha, a Nigerian dictator whose five-year tenure was “known for its corruption and brutality.”
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Chagoury served as a “front for the general’s extensive business empire.” And the two had a business partner in their activities: Marc Rich, the fugitive oil and commodities broker. Chagoury apparently worked with Rich to sop up oil assets in Nigeria and sell them on the oil market for the benefit of General Abacha and his associates. The Nigerian media declared in 1999 that the “Gilbert Chagoury-Marc Rich alliance remains a formidable foe.”
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Abacha and Chagoury met when the future dictator was a young army officer. After Abacha carried out a coup in 1993, Chagoury received prized oil concessions and government construction contracts.
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In exchange, Chagoury helped the general siphon off money and get it out of the country. Abacha’s rule was highly criticized in Washington, where hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign assistance were disappearing into European bank accounts.
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During his rule, Abacha funneled billions of dollars to foreign bank accounts. Nigeria’s lead anticorruption prosecutor at the time, Nuhu Ribadu, put Chagoury at the center of the scheme. “You couldn’t investigate corruption without looking at
Chagoury,” he said. According to Ribadu, Chagoury helped steer more than $4 billion into bank accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and the Isle of Jersey.
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Recognizing that it helped to have highly placed friends in Washington, Chagoury started funneling money to the 1996 Clinton reelection campaign and the Democratic National Committee. He contributed $460,000 to a Miami-based voter registration group tied to the DNC. (Because Chagoury is not an American citizen, he is unable to legally contribute directly to a campaign.) As the
Washington Post
put it, the nearly half-million-dollar contribution was given to “curry favor with Clinton’s administration on Abacha’s behalf.”
⁷⁹

Apparently it worked: in 1996, Chagoury and his wife attended the White House Christmas party.
⁸⁰
More significantly, Bill effectively changed US policy toward Nigeria with a single sentence. The United States government had been pressuring Abacha to step down and hold elections. Abacha was expected to go. But President Clinton said in 1998, “If [Abacha] stands for election, we hope he will stand as a civilian.”
⁸¹
In short, Clinton signaled that Abacha could stay; he simply needed to run as a civilian. The
New York Times
called it a “shift” in US policy.

When Abacha died in 1998 (allegedly in the company of two prostitutes), the Nigerian government and European authorities began investigating the missing money.
⁸²
They quickly fingered Chagoury. In 2000 he was convicted in Geneva, Switzerland, of money laundering and “aiding a criminal organization in connection with the billions of dollars stolen from Nigeria during the Abacha years,” as PBS’s
Frontline
put it. (As part of a plea deal the conviction was later expunged.)
⁸³
Chagoury cut a deal with the Nigerians and Swiss, returning $300 million of his own profits in exchange for legal immunity. Subsequently, the tiny island state of St. Lucia appointed him as its envoy to the
United Nations Education, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), bringing him diplomatic immunity and preventing prosecution in other European countries.
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Why St. Lucia bestowed this honor on him is unclear.

Chagoury’s apparent complicity in the looting of Nigeria by a brutal dictator might be enough to deter most people from doing business with him. But not the Clintons. If anything, their relationship has blossomed. Clinton has recently been described as Chagoury’s “close friend.”
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Since his conviction in Europe, Chagoury has donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. In 2009, shortly after Hillary became secretary of state, he pledged a whopping $1 billion to the Clinton’s legacy project.
⁸⁶
During a speech Bill delivered in St. Lucia, the island’s prime minister extended thanks to Chagoury for arranging the visit.
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He was also an invited guest to Bill’s sixtieth birthday party and attended the wedding of Bill’s longtime aide Doug Band. The Chagourys were also active in Hillary’s 2008 presidential bid. Michel Chaghouri, a nephew in Los Angeles, was a bundler for the campaign and served on the campaign staff.
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Numerous other relatives gave the maximum $4,600 each to her campaign.
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Chagoury’s legal troubles continued. In April 2010 Gilbert Chagoury and his brother Jack were indicted by the US Justice Department in a massive bribery scandal involving $6 billion and Halliburton. Bribes had allegedly been paid to secure contracts in Nigeria. Eventually Chagoury and his brother were dropped from the case, and Halliburton settled with the federal government for $35 million.
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Bill has lavished praise on Chagoury over the years. In 2005 Chagoury was presented with the Pride of Heritage award from the Lebanese community by Bill.
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And in 2009 the Clinton Global Initiative gave Chagoury’s company an award for
sustainable development.
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In 2013 Bill showed up in Nigeria for a public ceremony involving one of Chagoury’s construction projects.

Why the Clintons continue to associate with, take money from, and have transactions with Gilbert Chagoury remains a mystery. No less an expert than Marc Rich, who had years of experience working with Chagoury and Nigeria, once described the country as “the global capital of corruption.”
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The Clinton Foundation has made its work in Africa a centerpiece of its global work on HIV/AIDS and development. Unfortunately, many of those who are paying it and providing it with funds have profited off the worst excesses on the continent. One has to wonder why the Clintons would permit themselves to be so closely tied to such a corrupt group of individuals.

CHAPTER 9

Rainforest Riches

H
ILLARY
, B
ILL, AND
C
OLOMBIAN
T
IMBER AND
O
IL
D
EALS

I
n early June 2010 Bill Clinton met Frank Giustra in Colombia to launch a $20 million fund for small businesses.
¹
The two had visited Colombia together numerous times: for paid speeches, to look in on Giustra’s growing investments there, and to launch a Clinton Foundation project in the country.

Giustra was invested in natural resources in Colombia. And he was looking to expand his holdings in oil, natural gas, coal, and timber. The country had been plagued by violence and narcoterrorism for decades and was slowly coming out of it, thanks in part to a large infusion of American foreign aid. (Colombia was the fourth largest recipient of US foreign and military aid in the world.) It was also desperate to get a free-trade agreement passed in the United States to jump-start its economy.

What that meant was that Hillary, as secretary of state, held much of the country’s future in her hands. And as some unseen power of timing would have it, Hillary was set to arrive in Colombia the very next day. In her memoirs, Hillary called the fact that she and her husband were both in the country “a happy coincidence in our hectic schedules.”
²

It was the waning weeks of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe’s tenure in office. The thin, bespectacled Uribe had first been elected in 2002 on a platform of fighting terrorism and violence. When he took office, he later wrote, “Vast swathes of Colombia were under total dominion of the
narcoterroristas
.”
³
For Uribe the fight was personal: his father had been killed by Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) terrorists in the 1980s. During his eight years in office, he had achieved an impressive record of success. But term limits prevented him from running again. (He tried holding a popular referendum that would get him another term, but Colombian courts rejected it.) He would be out of office by August 2010 but still had substantial powers until the next election.

Hillary was popping over to Bogotá from nearby Ecuador aboard a US government plane. After her aircraft touched down at Colombia’s Catam Military Airport, she was greeted by US ambassador William Brownfield and Colombian foreign minister Jaime Bermudez. Hillary expressed her strong support for the Uribe government and closer ties with Colombia. “The United States will continue to support the Colombian people, the Colombian military and their government in the ongoing struggle against the insurgents, the guerrillas, the narco-traffickers who would wish to turn the clock back,” she said.
⁴

These were not meaningless niceties. Only a couple of months earlier, three influential Democratic senators—who were also Hillary’s friends—had written to her about cutting aid to Colombia.
Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Chris Dodd of Connecticut, and Patrick Leahy of Vermont had penned a letter saying it was time to back away. “Given U.S. record budget deficits, we cannot afford to continue assistance that is not achieving sufficient results,” they wrote. They also dinged Uribe on human rights. “In particular,” they said, “human rights abuses by Colombian military personnel supported by the U.S. continue, and those responsible are rarely brought to justice.”
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Nor were they alone. Foreign aid for Colombia was never a popular subject among Democrats, who were worried about human rights and labor rights conditions in the country.
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From the airport Hillary headed into Bogotá and met Bill at a restaurant in the northern part of the city. With a few friends (it is unclear if Giustra was also there) they enjoyed cappuccinos and a steak dinner.

The next morning, June 9, Bill headed to Casa de Nariño, the presidential palace, for a quiet meeting with President Uribe. They met for approximately an hour and had what the media called an “animated dialogue.”
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Bill left Casa de Nariño before noon. Hillary arrived for lunch with the president, after which they signed a series of science and technology agreements. Most importantly for Uribe, Hillary also lent her vocal support to a trade agreement between the United States and Colombia. “First, let me underscore President Obama’s and my commitment to the Free Trade Agreement,” she told RCN Television. “We are going to continue to work to obtain the votes in the Congress to be able to pass it. We think it’s strongly in the interests of both Colombia and the United States. And I return very invigorated . . . to begin a very intensive effort to try to obtain the votes to get the Free Trade Agreement finally ratified.”
⁸

Uribe could not have been more pleased. It is also worth noting
that her support for this agreement represented a complete reversal of her position—and Obama’s—from the 2008 campaign.

Days after Hillary left Bogotá, Prima Colombia Properties, which Frank Giustra has ownership interest in through a shell company called Flagship Industries, announced that it had acquired the right to cut timber in a biologically diverse forest on the pristine Colombian shoreline. The International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) calls this property “one of the world’s largest untapped hardwood timber supplies.”
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Through its Colombia-domiciled subsidiary REM International CISA, Prima entered into an exclusive agreement with the Colombian government giving it the right to “harvest 1,050,000 cubic meters of hardwood” on the west coast of Colombia.
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The timber would be cut along picturesque Huaca Beach in Choco and shipped to China.
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Days later, Pacific Rubiales Energy, a company for which Giustra was the Canadian face, announced that the Uribe government was giving the company the right to drill for oil on six lucrative plots.
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Pacific Rubiales acquired the largest exploration acreage in the Putumayo Basin, which sits at the center of Colombia’s oil belt. The other plots were in the giant reserves east of Ciusiana-Cupiagua, and three blocks in the Llanos Basin, a prolific oil-rich area at the foot of the Andes mountains.

It was a stunning success, given that Pacific Rubiales was a relatively new company with little track record in the country. But these lucrative concessions helped the company grow quickly. As German Hernandez, who oversees business operations for the company, explained in 2011, “[A few years ago] we were fewer than 20 people, practically living in tents with mosquito netting. . . . Today we are the number one project in the petroleum industry in Colombia.”
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By the end of 2010 the
company was producing a net of seventy thousand barrels of oil equivalent per day in Colombia, and boasted a market cap of over $8.3 billion.
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