The Giustra File: “Sustainable Growth” & Huge Profits

We can’t say we weren’t warned. As revelations pour in about the sketchy ties between big business, big donors, the State Department and the Clinton Foundation, the founding documents of that relationship continue to surprise, sometimes for sheer audacity. Here are the Clintons, in a 2008 Memorandum of Understanding drafted for the Obama presidential transition team, on the role mining mogul Frank Giustra and other resource-extraction giants would play in the foundation’s “Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative (CGSGI).”

“CGSGI works with the mining industry, local and national governments, and other non-governmental organizations to enable sustainable growth in countries where the mining sector plays a significant role,” the memorandum notes. “It is funded by significant commitments from Frank Giustra, Carlos Slim, Lukas Lundin and various mining related entities.”

On another front, the Washington Post reported yesterday that Giustra formed in Canada a charity, the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (CGEP), that evaded the State Department ethics agreement by concealing the names of some 1,100 donors. According to the Post, the CGEP “has spent nearly $30 million in current U.S. dollars since 2007; and nearly $25 million of that spending has gone directly to the Clinton Foundation.”

Shaking down the mining industry for donations to “sustainable growth” is a beautiful scam, truly Clintonian in its slickness. But we now know that Frank Giustra probably had the last laugh. News reports say Giustra himself donated more than $31 million to the Clinton Foundation since the mid-2000s—a relationship that greased the skids for huge profits in his deals for Kazakh uranium and Colombian energy.