STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Friday, 6 March 2015

[Demeter]

6. Eric Braverman Tried to Change the Clinton Foundation. Then He Quit.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/clinton-foundation-eric-braverman-115598_full.html#.VPRQZmY3Xaa

In December, the board of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation approved a salary of more than $395,000, plus bonus, for its Yale-educated CEO, Eric Braverman, while voting to extend his board term through 2017, according to sources familiar with the arrangement. Braverman, who had worked with Chelsea Clinton at the prestigious McKinsey & Company consultancy, had been brought in with the former first daughter’s support to help impose McKinsey-like management rigor to a foundation that had grown into a $2 billion charitable powerhouse.

But in January, only weeks after the board's show of support and just a year and a half after Braverman arrived, he abruptly resigned, and sources tell Politico his exit stemmed partly from a power struggle inside the foundation between and among the coterie of Clinton loyalists who have surrounded the former president for decades and who helped start and run the foundation. Some, including the president’s old Arkansas lawyer Bruce Lindsey, who preceded Braverman as CEO, raised concerns directly to Bill Clinton about the reforms implemented by Braverman, according to sources, and felt themselves marginalized by the growing influence of Chelsea Clinton and the new CEO she had helped recruit. The previously untold saga of Braverman’s brief, and occasionally fraught tenure trying to navigate the Clintons’ insular world highlights the challenges the family has faced trying to impose rigorous oversight onto a vast global foundation that relies on some of the same loyal megadonors Hillary Clinton will need for the presidential run sources have said she is all but certain to launch later this year.

Already, a spate of recent news stories in Politico and elsewhere have highlighted questions about the foundation’s aggressive fundraising both before and during Braverman’s tenure, including the news that the foundation had been accepting contributions from foreign governments with lax oversight from the State Department when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. The foundation has been Clinton’s main public platform since she left State in February 2013. The hiring a few months later of Braverman, who had been a partner in McKinsey’s Washington office, was seen as validation of Chelsea Clinton’s view that the foundation needed to address recommendations from a 2011 audit for tighter governance and budgeting, as well as more comprehensive policies to vet donors and avoid conflicts of interest.

When Braverman arrived to replace Lindsey as CEO, he moved quickly to adopt the auditor’s recommendations, and then some. He diversified the foundation’s board beyond the Clintons and their longtime political allies and restructured its finance department. He oversaw the creation of a $250 million endowment and implemented data-driven analytics to measure the effectiveness of foundation programs...But sources say Braverman’s modernization efforts were hampered by the occasionally conflicting visions of the three Clintons, and their rival staff factions. Some told Braverman, “You don’t know how this place works,” while others—including Lindsey—second-guessed Braverman to Bill Clinton, according to sources familiar with the situation. They said a repeated refrain from the old guard was that Braverman was in it for his own glory.

YEAH, SUUURE.....



The foundation announced that, while it was looking for a permanent successor, longtime Clinton loyalist Maura Pally would serve as acting CEO. Other than a stint at Bloomberg Philanthropies (which has donated more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation’s efforts), Pally had spent most of her professional life working for the Clintons, from Bill Clinton’s White House to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and subsequent State Department term... some family allies think Braverman’s experience offers lessons that could help Hillary Clinton as she chooses from the scores of operatives jockeying to work for a 2016 campaign. “This is the story of their lives. They’ve always been torn between the super, super loyalists who are protecting them and the extremely competent people who don’t owe their whole careers to them,” said one former Clinton aide. “They need to try to strike that balance. And her campaign, at least so far, seems to be bringing in competent people who haven’t all come from that world.”

RECYCLED HACKS FROM PREVIOUS ADMINISTRATION FAILURES ARE DEEMED COMPETENT?

MORE