Seven Wealthy Men Keeping Their Money at the Scandal-Plagued HSBC Have Donated/Bribed $81 Million to Hillary Clinton's Bribery Storefront

When the HSBC banking scandal broke again last month, I wondered if the Clintons were connected to it.

Duh. Of course the Clintons are connected to it.

The charitable foundation run by Hillary Clinton and her family has received as much as $81m from wealthy international donors who were clients of HSBC’s controversial Swiss bank.

Leaked files from HSBC’s Swiss banking division reveal the identities of seven donors to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation with accounts in Geneva.

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Hillary Clinton has expressed concern over growing economic inequality in the US and is expected to make the issue a cornerstone of her widely anticipated presidential campaign in 2016. However, political observers are increasingly asking whether the former secretary of state’s focus on wealth inequality sits uncomfortably with the close relationships she and her husband have nurtured with some of the world’s richest individuals.

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Another Clinton foundation donor who had a HSBC account in the tax haven is Jeffrey Epstein, the hedge fund manager and convicted sex offender who once flew the former president on his private jet for charity events in Africa.

One guy, named Caring, gave the foundation -- which, by the way, is largley a front group to keep the Clintons' political staff paid between elections -- one million dollars from his tax-free HSBC account in exchange for Bill Clinton's appearance at his lavish costume party in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Caring arranged for 18th century Russian costumes, borrowed from the Hermitage Museum, to be tailor-fitted for each guest at the event at Catherine the Great's Winter Palace. Photographs from the event in November 2005 show Bill Clinton, dressed as a Russian general, partying with other VIP guests such as Elizabeth Hurley. Entertainment was provided by Tina Turner and Elton John.

Caring fundraised during this event, and sent some money, he says, to a British Children's charity and.. the Clinton foundation.

But Ms. Clinton is totes a crusader against income inequality. And also, closing tax loopholes for the rich. Like HSBC.

"One of the issues that I have been preaching about around the world is collecting taxes in an equitable manner, especially from the elites in every country," Hillary Clinton told audience of the Clinton Global Initiative in 2012, when she was still secretary of state. "It is a fact that around the world, the elites of every country are making money. There are rich people everywhere. And yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries. They don't invest in public schools, in public hospitals, in other kinds of development internally."

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A spokesperson for Hillary Clinton declined to comment about her family foundation’s receipt of money from donors with accounts in Geneva.

Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton's convicted pedophile sex party buddy, also has several HSBC accounts in Geneva, and also donated to Clinton.

Other HSBC Geneva clients who donated $1m or more to the Clinton foundation include ex-Formula One racing driver Michael Schumacher, billionaire businessman Eli Broad, and the French hedge-fund manager Arpad Busson.

And:

Another client of HSBC Geneva to donate to the Clinton foundation is Denise Rich, the ex-wife of the late billionaire and commodities trader Marc Rich, who fled to Switzerland in 1983 after being indicted by US authorities for tax evasion, fraud and racketeering. Mark Rich was was controversially granted a presidential pardon by Bill Clinton just hours before the former president left office in 2001.

Denise Rich contributed as much as $500,000 to the Clinton foundation. Now 70, she is reported to have recently renounced her US citizenship, becoming tax-resident in Austria. She did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The biggest donor, who may have donated more than $50 million to Clinton (we don't know for sure), is a Canadian mining magnate named Frank Giustra.

Per Wikipedia, in between forming Lionsgate Entertainment, which then distributed Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11, Giustra seems to get a certain amount of economic benefit from his sponsorship of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign:

Mr. Giustra became close with former US President Bill Clinton during fundraising efforts for tsunami relief in 2004. Giustra is a member of the board of trustees of the Clinton Foundation. Giustra provided his corporate jet for Clinton's fundraising campaign in Africa. The two play the card game Oh Hell during flights. In September 2005, Giustra flew Clinton to Kazakhstan as part of a three-country philanthropic tour. Clinton praised the Kazakh autocrat for "this statement you have made about opening up the social and political life [of Kazakhstan]". Within two days of the former President's meeting with Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazarbayev, Giustra's fledgling uranium company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by the state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom. "The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers."[14][15] In 2006, in the months after Mr. Clinton's visit helped secure Giustra's company the right to mine uranium in Kazakhstan, Mr. Giustra donated $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation.[14] This figure is at variance with the one released by the William J. Clinton Foundation (on the 18 December 2008), as part of an arrangement with President-elect Barack Obama. It reports Frank Giustra as giving between US$10–25 million.[16]

posted by Ace at 07:13 PM

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