ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross has shepherded a detailed analysis of the tangled web of public and private aid relief after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti with the Clinton Foundation (and Hillary Clinton’s State Department) at the center of the complicated network:
Bill and Hillary Clinton have hailed the factory churning out Old Navy sweatshirts in an industrial park here as a shining achievement in their efforts to rebuild this island nation after a destructive earthquake in 2010.
But the garment factory has under-delivered on projected jobs. Haitian workers have accused managers of bullying and sexual harassment. And an ABC News investigation has found that after opening its factory in the Haitian industrial park — built with $400 million of global aid — the Korean firm became a Clinton Foundation donor and its owner invested in a startup company owned by Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff.
You should read the entire post as there are details that will blow your mind, like the Team Clinton’s focus on getting a luxury Marriott Hotel built in Haiti while hundreds of Haitians continue to live in squalor:
But in Port-au-Prince, where neighborhoods still teem with flimsy lean-tos and tarp-covered shacks, residents told ABC News they harbor frustrations with the way the Clintons marshaled international aid.
“I didn’t get any of the money,” said Inèse Luma, who lives crammed with five relatives in a makeshift home of tarp, wood and plastic. “I don’t think I’m ever going to have a permanent house.”
Efforts to rebuild the thousands of homes destroyed by the 7.0 quake have inched forward. In six years, USAID says, it has constructed fewer than 1,500 homes, and many of those have had to be rebuilt because of poor workmanship.
At the same time, the Clinton Foundation says it “facilitated” the construction of a luxury hotel in Port-au-Prince, a Marriott owned by Denis O’Brien, who has given $10 million to $25 million to the Clinton Foundation. O’Brien, an Irish billionaire who runs the Jamaica-based telecom giant Digicel, said he financed the hotel himself.
Make no mistake, many of the projects were financed through international aid organizations funded by various world governments led by the United States. And, as it turns out, many of the corporations receiving the largest amount of financial aid and incentive from these government-funded agencies were also big donors to the Clinton Foundation.
The modern industrial park, with wide, clear roads connecting rows of low-slung warehouses, would be paid for by the Inter-American Development Bank, which provided $256.8 million in grants to support construction. The bank has donated $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to its website. Large American retailers, including Wal-Mart and Gap Inc., have served as buyers for the clothes shipped from Haiti to the U.S. with special U.S. tax breaks. Wal-Mart has given $1 million to $5 million, and Gap has given $100,000 to $250,000 to the foundation. And in 2012, SAE-A, the Korean garment company that was recruited to become the anchor tenant of the park, gave $50,000 to $100,000 to the foundation.
And no story about corruption in the Clinton State Department would be complete without Cheryl Mills making an appearance:
Two years after the factory was operational, Mills had left the State Department. She turned up, according to an online press release, at a Sae-A company event in Costa Rica. She appeared there, the release said, on behalf of her privately owned international development firm, Black Ivy Group. “Ms. Mills was invited and came to the event as a guest, as did many others,” Garwood said, in response to questions from ABC News.
The chairman of SAE-A, Woong-ki Kim, was identified on the Black Ivy website as one of the initial investors in the firm. That page has since been taken down. “The chairman’s investment in Black Ivy was a personal investment that was not made until late in 2014,” Garwood said. “As a policy, the chairman does not discuss his personal investments.”
Black Ivy Group is described on its website as a firm that “builds and grows commercial enterprises in sub-Saharan Africa” and focuses on “building and leveraging a vast network of global and local relationships spanning the public, private and government sectors.” Mills’ partner in the venture, Jean-Louis Warnholz, worked on the Caracol project in Haiti while serving as a senior State Department adviser to Hillary Clinton.
This exposé coupled with yesterday’s email dump that revealed State Department employees screening out Haitian relief efforts in the category of Clinton VIPs and the lowly, non-FOB rabble should draw more attention to the corrupt breakdown of the supposed “wall” between State Department operations and the Clinton Foundation during Hillary’s tenure.
Should. That is, if anyone cares to stop talking about Donald Trump’s lust for hot Hollywood starlets 11 years ago.
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