The family business
There was a film in 1953 called How to Marry a Millionaire (the first movie to be made in CinemaScope, by the way). The film was pretty funny, but the widescreen sequel we are now seeing is not The NYT has perhaps plotted the sequel — in the modern version, a Senator arranges for her husband to become a former President of the United States, which is when the goodies really start to flow, and suddenly she finds that she’s married to a near billionaire:
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…Bill Clinton…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…
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…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…
A spokesman for Mr. Clinton said the former president knew that Mr. Giustra had mining interests in Kazakhstan but was unaware of “any particular efforts” and did nothing to help. Mr. Giustra said he was there as an “observer only” and there was “no discussion” of the deal with Mr. Nazarbayev or Mr. Clinton. But Moukhtar Dzhakishev, president of Kazatomprom, said in an interview that Mr. Giustra did discuss it, directly with the Kazakh president, and that his friendship with Mr. Clinton “of course made an impression.”…
Mr. Clinton’s Kazakhstan visit, the only one of his post-presidency, appears to have been arranged hastily…The publicly stated reason for the visit was to announce a Clinton Foundation agreement that enabled the government to buy discounted AIDS drugs.
So Mr. Clinton, or the foundation he controls, apparently made $131 million on just one deal. That’s quite a step up from the $200,000 President’s salary. But Clinton’s was not the only Hollywood ending:
In February 2007, a company called Uranium One agreed to pay $3.1 billion to acquire UrAsia. Mr. Giustra, a director and major shareholder in UrAsia, would be paid $7.05 per share for a company that just two years earlier was trading at 10 cents per share.
Isn’t that nice for America’s once and future first family and their friends. (We note that this excellent NYT piece eschews outrage and sticks pretty much to the facts, unlike another Times’ article on Presidents earning money after their terms. Regarding the current President Bush, it spoke of “critics accusing him — in advance — of venality, greed and capitalizing on his presidency in a time of war,” even though he won’t be out of office until 2009.)
Final point: the Clinton campaign is apparently now monitoring the author of the NYT piece, Jo Becker.