NYT: An Ex-President, a Mining Deal and a Big Donor (Clinton's shady uranium quid pro quo?)

[jefferson_dem]

January 31, 2008
An Ex-President, a Mining Deal and a Big Donor
By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.

Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.

Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s 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 in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

[KennedyGuy]

1. More Bill..

I heard Michelle shops at Wal-Mart...
this all ya got?

[EmperorHasNoClothes]

3. Do you think this type of thing will stop if Hillary is elected?

You have to admit it's a little disturbing.

[Seen the light]

2. Bu-bu-bu-bu-but REEEEEEEZKO!

Oh Clintons, what will we do with you?

[aquart]

4. Donation to a charity vs helping to buy one's own house.

The rotten Bill Clinton shook down a rich guy to get money to buy AIDS drugs. Bad Bill. Very bad Bill. He helped the rich guy make nice with a nasty guy who had uranium.

Bad, bad, Bill. When nasty dictators have things we want, sucking up to them works like a charm.

Is there someone here who doesn't believe that our president, whomever, will do that DAILY?