That may be true, but it does not explain why the Clinton Foundation saw fit to accept such a large contribution from such a questionable source.
The Lundin Companies were founded by Lukas’s father, Adolph, who had made a lot of cash mining in apartheid South Africa after the United Nations applied international sanctions. While other companies had fled the country in the face of international pressure, Lundin stayed. When Adolph died in 2006, Lukas continued where his father left off, working in the darker corners of Africa, where few companies ventured. The Africa Oil Corporation, in which they owned a controlling share, was active in Ethiopia’s Rift Valley, a region run by a corrupt dictatorial regime. Lundin also had a spin-off called Horn Petroleum that was drilling in Somalia even though the government there collapsed in 1990 and the country was essentially run by warlords.11 Lukas Lundin was also chairman of a company called NGEx Resources that was mining in Eritrea, a region that was attempting to break away from Ethiopia.12 The company also had a heavy stake in gold mining operations in Mauritania and Ghana.13
But perhaps the most lucrative mining operations in the Lundin portfolio were in the war-torn DRC, which has known more death, corruption, and fighting than perhaps any other area of Africa.
The Lundins got their foot in the door by striking a bargain with a Marxist warlord. In early 1997 the Congolese rebel leader Laurent Kabila, who had once worked with Che Guevara, was in the middle of a campaign to overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko, the country’s longtime strongman ruler. To finance his rebel campaign, he sent a representative to Canada to talk to mining companies about “investment opportunities.” His proposal was simple: give me money and I will give you lucrative mining rights in my country once I seize power. One of the first to bite was the Lundin family, which signed an agreement with the rebels and provided them with most of the funds they needed to march into the capital. The Lundins reportedly paid $50 million to Kabila’s “finance minister,” the first installment of $250 million they would give to the rebels. The rebels wanted cash and by all accounts didn’t know what they were doing. Kabila’s minister of mines, Kambale Mututulo, had never seen one. “He asked us to send him some books on how to run one,” noted one executive who met with him.14
For the Lundins, this was an enormously lucrative opportunity. “There are moments in the history of mining when you can make deals like this under excellent terms,” said Adolph Lundin at the time.15
By the time Lukas Lundin made his $100 million pledge to the Clinton Foundation, the Congo operation was making the company “staggering profits.”16 But for the profits to remain staggering, US policy needed to remain unchanged. The 2006 Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act, which Hillary had cosponsored, placed those investments at serious risk, because they threatened to overturn the political leadership in the country. What benefited Lundin was the status quo in Congo. That status quo was preserved by Hillary’s disappointing failure as secretary of state to implement any of the key provisions in the law that she had strongly advocated only a few years earlier—before Lundin made his contribution. According to a July 2012 article in Foreign Policy, the law had real teeth and empowered the secretary of state to intervene in a number of important ways. Yet for reasons unknown, Hillary chose not to do so.
This failure to act could at best be described as a sin of omission—though it is a sin compounded by her many promises as a senator to bring real change to the DRC. But Hillary was apparently willing to intervene directly when other well-connected mining companies saw their interests threatened, including foreign mining companies she had no real reason to support. In 2009 a DRC government commission claimed that a Canadian company called First Quantum Minerals Ltd. had won a lucrative concession for a Lonshi mine (worth $1 billion Canadian) through questionable methods. According to the commission, First Quantum won the Lonshi concession without any competitive bidding. The company had allegedly offered “cash payments and shares” to some government officials to get it. DRC officials wanted to cancel the contract and suspend the company’s license. But according to Le Monde Diplomatique, a prominent French publication, Hillary intervened and tried to pressure the government to restore the company’s license. In January 2012 First Quantum received $1.25 billion for its Congolese assets.17
Why did the US State Department seek to intervene for a Canadian company doing business in the DRC, especially when 90 percent of the mine’s yield ended up in China? We do not know. But it is certainly worth noting that First Quantum was founded by Canadian businessman Jean-Raymond Boulle, a longtime Clinton friend and benefactor. It was Boulle who had put together the diamond deal in Arkansas back in the 1980s when Bill was governor. Hillary wore one of his diamonds to the Clinton inaugural ball.
But Boulle was not the only Clinton donor or ally who was seeking to exploit the DRC’s vast mineral wealth.
Former NBA star Dikembe Mutombo has worked with the Clinton Global Initiative as a partner and was appointed by Hillary to the State Department’s Young African Leaders Initiative in 2010. In October 2011 he was a member of an official State Department delegation to Sudan. The following month he joined forces with a Hillary presidential campaign bundler named Kase Lawal on a $10 million venture to transport 4.5 tons of gold out of the Democratic Republic of Congo.18 According to a UN report, the deal involved some of the most notorious war criminals on the planet, including “individuals operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and committing serious violations of international law involving the targeting of children or women.”19
Lawal, a Nigerian and devout Muslim who lived in Houston, was the head of CAMAC, an energy company that did considerable business in Nigeria. He also had a long history with the Clintons. In the 1990s, Bill had appointed Lawal to his Trade Advisory Committee on Africa.20 When Bill visited Africa in 1998 as president, Lawal accompanied him. Lawal’s CAMAC featured on its board former Clinton energy secretary Hazel O’Leary and former Clinton senior White House official Dr. Lee Patrick Brown.21
According to a 2012 report in the Atlantic Monthly, Lawal leased a Gulfstream V jet from Dallas-based Southlake Aviation and sent his half brother Mickey Lawal (vice president of CAMAC), along with Reagan Mutombo (Dikembe’s nephew) and employees from his company, to Africa to secure the prize. Also involved was a Texas-based diamond trader named Carlos St. Mary. If all went well, the expected profit was a quick $20 million.22
All did not go well. The Gulfstream ended up in Goma, Congo. The man they were dealing with to secure the gold was a notorious warlord named Bosco Ntaganda. There are plenty of nefarious criminal leaders in Africa, but Ntaganda belongs near the top of the list. The International Criminal Court indicted him in 2006 for using child soldiers. He was also categorized as a sanctioned individual on the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control list. The consequences: US citizens doing business with him faced the possibility of up to twenty years in prison.
As text messages obtained by UN investigators make clear, Kase Lawal knew he was dealing with the notorious Ntaganda. And from the beginning he knew that the gold was from the DRC. To combat the export of gold by warlords and criminal bans, the DRC government banned unregulated exports of gold out of the country.23 Lawal denied any involvement in illegal activities.
The “delegation” from Lawal and Mutombo transferred $5 million of the cash and awaited their gold. But then DRC customs officials seized the Gulfstream and arrested everyone onboard.24
The owner of the leased jet, David Disiere, got a call in the dead of night informing him that the $43 million jet was loaded with ten boxes of gold but was now being held by authorities in Goma. Detained by Congo authorities for the violation of several laws, Lawal and Mutombo contacted the State Department to get them released. As the Texas diamond trader St. Mary described it later in a legal deposition, “He [Mutombo] said that . . . he had lobbied a lot on our behalf with Washington, D.C. and he indicated that—that Kase was quite impressed with his ability—his ab
ility to lobby at the U.S. State Department on our behalf and was surprised at the number of people that he knew because he was the former ambassador to the Congo under Clinton’s administration.”25
They were released from jail following State Department intervention. No one involved has faced criminal charges in the United States.
Meanwhile, at the same time that Lukas Lundin made his $100 million commitment to the Clinton Foundation, another major foreign investor with much at stake in Africa was doing the same thing.
Less than three months after Hillary announced her presidential bid, Bill was in London for a meeting with a reclusive Saudi sheikh named Mohammed al-Amoudi. Amoudi was the head of a sprawling conglomerate called the Mohammed International Development Research and Organization Companies (MIDROC), which had extensive interests in Ethiopia including mines, agriculture, hotels, hospitals, steel, and cement.26
Born in Ethiopia to an Ethiopian mother and a Yemeni father, Amoudi grew up in Saudi Arabia and became the kingdom’s second richest man.27 Much of his wealth derived from his close relationship with Ethiopia’s repressive government, which sold him government assets—mines, concessions, and land—for deeply discounted prices. An enormous amount of his wealth was tied up with that government and he took acts likely aimed at helping it stay in power.28
On May 14, 2007, in a small ceremony, the sheikh announced that he was committing $20 million to the Clinton Foundation. He started things off with a check for $2 million.29
Amoudi was familiar with the money ways of Washington. His lobbying firm in Washington included Senators George Mitchell, Lloyd Bentsen (who had been treasury secretary when Bill was president), and Bob Dole as paid advisers.30
In May 2007, when he made his commitment to the Clinton Foundation, the Ethiopia Democracy and Accountability Act (H.R. 2003) had just been introduced by Congressman Donald Payne. The bill quickly acquired eighty-five cosponsors in the House and passed on October 2, 2007. The United States was sending hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to Ethiopia every year: the bill called for tying that aid directly to progress on human rights. For Amoudi’s interests, a bill pressuring the regime that had given him so much to reform would be a disaster. Amoudi’s business interests were protected by the ruling regime in Ethiopia. Indeed, some of his businesses had been purchased at bargain-basement prices during the privatization of government assets. A democratic election bringing in new leadership would put them at risk.
As the bill moved to the US Senate, many looked to see where Senator Clinton would come down. After all, she was the clear frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination at the time and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
An Ethiopian human rights organization sent a letter in 2009 to former president Clinton at the Clinton Foundation warning that the donation was an attempt to influence US policy toward Ethiopia. “We have reason to believe that the huge donation to the Clinton Foundation was made on behalf of the Ethiopian government. . . . Although we believe in philanthropy, there is something troubling with this picture. By all accounts, Sheikh Amoudi, the owner of Ethiopia’s famous Sheraton Hotel, is not known for much philanthropy.”
The letter, a copy of which was also sent to Hillary at the State Department, further noted what observers in other countries had seen. “Local AIDS organizations that appealed to the billionaire [Amoudi] for paltry sums were turned down,” the Ethiopians wrote to Clinton. “So why would a wealthy man from one of the poorest countries in the world say no to organizations in his country and yet easily cough up $20 million for an American organization 10,000 miles away? Is this just a coincidence that the donation was made at the start of U.S. presidential elections?”31
The letter also asserted that the Clinton Foundation had a close working relationship with the oppressive government. “The work of the Clinton Foundation in Ethiopia is loosely intertwined with government operations. We urge you to go beyond the government and to seek out independent community organizations that are closely working with the poor.”32
Neither Bill nor the foundation ever responded. Instead, as we will see, when Hillary became secretary of state, Amoudi’s companies received special benefits from the US State Department, including taxpayer funds.
Much of Amoudi’s wealth came from his relationship with Ethiopia’s longtime dictator, Meles Zenawi. A diminutive man with a goatee and arched eyebrows, Zenawi had joined a rebel group fighting the Marxist Mengistu regime. He quickly rose through the ranks. When they seized power in 1991, Zenawi was thirty-six and became head of the country.33
It is hard to overstate how closely Amoudi’s wealth was tied to Zenawi’s rule in Ethiopia. (When Zenawi died in 2012 of a mysterious stomach ailment, Amoudi would say, “I lost my right hand.”)34 Amoudi had been able to buy 70 percent of Ethiopia’s National Oil Corporation from the government. One of the sheikh’s companies, Saudi Star, was given leases on tens of thousands of acres of Ethiopian land.35 The sheikh controls Ethiopia’s steel production and is the country’s exclusive gold exporter, with one of his mines (also purchased from the government) producing more than ten thousand pounds of gold and silver per year.36
Zenawi’s policies pushed local people off their lands, decimated forests, and encroached on game reserves.37 The list of his offenses is immense, reported Britain’s prestigious The Lancet, including politically manipulating the foreign aid the United States and other countries provide: “badly needed food and agricultural aid that had been given by foreign donors was being denied to hungry village communities not allied with the ruling party.”38
Zenawi was a shrewd technocrat known for “imprisoning his political opponents, withholding development assistance from restive areas, stealing elections, and cracking down on civil society NGOs.” He sentenced journalists (including two Europeans) to lengthy jail terms. As The Atlantic put it, “From a human rights perspective, Zenawi’s rule has been abusive, heavy-handed, and self-interested.”39
On the plus side, under his rule Ethiopia also experienced rapid economic growth. And it was this economic growth that had led Bill Clinton to praise him as part of a “‘new generation’ of African leaders.”40 Zenawi’s ability to curry favor with some in the West while being a brutal dictator at home led one observer to note, “He was a charmer in Geneva and London. He was a stern, even brutal, autocrat at home.”41
Despite his mixed record, many in the West—including the Clintons—embraced and legitimized him. According to a leaked State Department cable, in 2007, on his way to attend the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Zenawi was invited to attend Clinton Foundation events in New York.42
When Hillary Clinton became secretary of state in January 2009, Ethiopian officials interacted confidently with US diplomats. Despite public statements coming from Washington about promoting human rights in Ethiopia and Africa, Ethiopian officials remained unfazed. In February 2010 Hillary’s undersecretary of state, Maria Otero, met with the dictator and raised questions about the plight and arrest of an opposition figure named Birtukan Midekssa. Zenawi told her that Midekssa will “vegetate in jail, forever,” according to leaked State Department cables obtained through WikiLeaks. As far as opposition groups were concerned, he said, “we will crush them with our full force.”43
It was a shocking display of disrespect, given that the United States was sending his government half a billion dollars a year. As Foreign Affairs put it, “Washington has expressed its concern about these issues to the Ethiopian government, and the Ethiopian government has reacted not only negatively but also insultingly—despite receiving $533 million in U.S. assistance in fiscal year 2010.”44
Zenawi aggressively went after not only domestic political opponents but also American organizations, like the US Chamber of Commerce and Jimmy Carter’s Carter Center, that were working in the country. According to another WikiLeaks State Department cable, diplomats raised concerns with Zenawi about his new policy requiring organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce and the Car
ter Center to seek government approval to use US money sent from the United States in Ethiopia. Zenawi said as far as the Carter Center was concerned, “Maybe we are better off if they do not come.” He was equally dismissive when diplomats raised questions about how the government restricted access to Western food aid in certain regions for political reasons.45
In 2012 Ethiopia was among the top sub-Saharan African recipients of US aid, with $707 million in planned aid. As secretary of state, Hillary was required to evaluate whether countries receiving American aid were transparent in how the money was spent. “The Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriation Act prohibits U.S. assistance to the central government of any country that does not meet minimum standards of fiscal transparency.” Unless, that is, Hillary decided to grant the country a waiver.46
State Department officials determined that Ethiopia failed to meet the transparency requirement. According to leaked cables from the embassy,
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