Foreign govt’s among Clinton donors – Yahoo! News

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 1:16 am

WASHINGTON – Foreign countries including Norway and Oman contributed to former President Bill Clinton’s charity, and donors including Donald Trump, multinational soft drink company Coca-Cola and singer Elton John’s foundation also pitched in as Hillary Rodham Clinton served her first year as secretary of state.
The foundation provided The Associated Press with a donor list Friday morning under the heading “William J. Clinton Foundation Publishes Names of 2009 Contributors on Foundation Website” but later said the disclosure, which included many more foreign governments, covered donors dating back to the charity’s inception, and that it wouldn’t identify who gave in 2009. The foundation changed course Friday afternoon and updated the list to specify 2009 donors.
The Clintons agreed to annually disclose the names of donors to the foundation to address concerns about potential conflicts of interest between the former president’s fundraising abroad and his wife’s role in helping direct Obama administration foreign policy.
The William J. Clinton Foundation works in the United States and around the world on such issues as health care, particularly HIV/AIDS; climate change, and economic development. It also runs the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Ark., which includes Clinton’s presidential library.
In releasing the list Friday, the foundation didn’t identify individual contributors’ employers, nationalities or any other details. The 2009 donors included three who ranked as the foundation’s all-time biggest givers, topping $25 million each since Bill Clinton founded the charity: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Canadian mining tycoon and Radcliffe Foundation chief executive Frank Giustra, and UNITAID.
Bill Clinton joined Giustra on a 2005 trip to Kazakhstan; within days after the pair met with Kazakhstan’s president, Giustra’s business lined up preliminary deals giving it rights to buy into uranium projects controlled by a Kazakhstan state-owned enterprise. In UNITAID’s case, almost all of the money simply passed through the foundation to buy commodities, the foundation said.
Those donating last year whose cumulative contributions total $5 million to $10 million include COPRESIDA, a Dominican Republic government agency formed to fight AIDS, whose donation of $5 million to $10 million passed through the foundation for commodity procurement; the Elton John AIDS Foundation; the Netherlands’ Nationale Postcode Loterij, and the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative – Canada.
The Clinton Family Foundation and Bill Clinton also gave in 2009; the donations total $1 million to $5 million over the years.

The Clintons were under no legal obligation to identify foundation donors. Presidents typically do not disclose the names of those who give to their foundations, even when the givers include foreign governments. In addition to providing a foundation donor list, the Clintons agreed that new donations from foreign governments would be examined by government ethics officers. William J. Clinton Foundation: http://www.clintonfoundation.org/

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