by Ken Silverstein who does Investigative Reporting:
---------------
Shaky Foundations
The Clintons’ so-called charitable enterprise has served as a vehicle to launder money and to enrich family friends.
By Ken Silverstein
After endless delays and excuses, the Clinton Foundation released its 2014 tax return as well as amended returns for the previous four years and an audit of its finances. That fulfilled a pledge made last April by Clinton Foundation acting CEO, Maura Pally, who acknowledged that the foundation had previously made a few unfortunate accounting “mistakes.”
Journalists are going to be scouring through this new financial information and pumping out “balanced” stories that evade what is already evident, namely that the Clintons have used their foundation for crass profiteering and influence peddling.
If the Justice Department and law enforcement agencies do their jobs, the foundation will be closed and its current and past trustees, who include Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton, will be indicted. That’s because their so-called charitable enterprise has served as a vehicle to launder money and to enrich Clinton family friends.
It is beyond dispute that former President Clinton has been directly involved in helping foundation donors and his personal cronies get rich. Even worse, it is beyond dispute that these very same donors and the Clintons’ political allies have won the focused attention of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton when she served as Secretary of State. Democrats and Clinton apologists will write these accusations off as conspiracy mongering and right-wing propaganda, but it’s an open secret to anyone remotely familiar with accounting and regulatory requirements for charities that the financial records are deliberately misleading. And not coincidentally, those records were long filed by a Little Rock–based accounting firm called BKD, a regional auditor with little international experience.
It’s odd that a small Arkansas-headquartered firm would handle the books for a giant entity like the Clinton Foundation, and even odder given that BKD has been implicated in a variety of misconduct. For example, last year the Securities and Exchange Commission sanctioned BKD for “violating auditor independence rules when they prepared the financial statements of brokerage firms that were their audit clients.”
It brings to mind Bernie Madoff, who also used a small accounting shop when he was running his notorious Ponzi scheme. And it’s worth emphasizing here that smaller firms are typically far less likely to challenge major clients, and the Clinton Foundation was one of BKD’s major sources of revenue.
The new audit that was released yesterday was prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a major accounting firm. I’ve been told by multiple sources with knowledge of the review that PwC was under tremendous outside pressure to turn in a truthful audit as opposed to the shoddy work performed by BKD. “The audit is the key, it’s far more important than the amended tax returns,” Charles Ortel, an independent financial expert, told me. “PwC is a top firm and they will not be able to claim they didn’t know that the past audits were fraudulent because they have been informed of problems. If they certify that the Clinton Foundation is clean, when it is apparent it is not, PwC is done. It may go the way of Arthur Andersen.” Ortel, a former managing director of Dillon, Read & Co., who helped expose massive financial fraud by GE, GM, and AIG before the 2008 global financial meltdown, was referring to the accounting firm that missed massive fraud by Enron and subsequently collapsed.
A Canadian charity called the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership—which is run by one of Bill Clinton’s close friends, Frank Giustra—has been moving significant sums of money into the Clinton Foundation’s flagship in New York. There’s no way for the public to know precisely how much total money the CGEP has taken in over the years—or how much it has forwarded on to the Clinton Foundation—because, unlike in the United States, under Canadian non-profit law charities don’t need to report donors to tax authorities. Earlier this year, after being severely criticized by the Canadian press, the CGEP released the names of twenty-four of its donors, but more than 1,000 are still unknown. (CGEP wrote in an email that “going forward [it] will publicly disclose all future donors.”)
The Clinton Foundation’s list of donors on its website puts the CGEP in the top category of $25 million-plus, however a financial-industry source who has seen the relevant records estimated that the figure is at least $33 million. According to Ortel that number is certainly understated. “There are no effective controls over the Clinton Foundation or the Giustra entity,” he told me. “No independent party has had access to the bank account records, including wire transfer records. There are no independent directors ensuring compliance with the law. Only a fool would have any confidence in their numbers; it’s like Al Capone forming a foundation.”
One money-laundering expert and former intelligence officer based in the Middle East who had access to the foundation’s confidential banking information told me that members of royal families in Middle Eastern countries, including Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, have donated money to the CGEP that has then been sluiced through to the Clinton Foundation. He added that the CGEP has also received money from corrupt officials in South Africa during the regime of Jacob Zuma and from senior officials in Equatorial Guinea, one of the most brutal and crooked dictatorships in the world. “Equatorial Guinea doesn’t give to the Clinton Foundation in New York because it’s too embarrassing,” he said. “They give the money anonymously in Canada and that buys them political protection in the United States. The Clinton Foundation is a professionally structured money-laundering operation.”
Continued and an Interesting Read at........
https://harpers.org/blog/2015/11/shaky-foundations/
= new reply since forum marked as read
