Even as Hillary Clinton is upping her anti-Wall Street rhetoric, here comes word that the Clinton Foundation is running a private-equity company down in Colombia.
The private-equity field is where Mitt Romney earned his fortune — and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads from the Obama campaign back in 2008.
The foundation’s Bogota-based firm, Fondo Acceso, was started in 2010 by Bill Clinton, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and mining magnate Frank Giustra, with seed funding of $20 million from the foundation’s Clinton-Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative and the SLIM Foundation, the Washington Free Beacon reports.
Anything to hide here? Well, Fondo Acceso took down its website once the Beacon broke the story. And the venture wasn’t even registered as a private-equity fund in Colombia, thereby skirting government oversight. A good move for an investment firm linked to the US secretary of state.
Ken Boehm, a watchdog with the National Legal and Policy Center, notes, “At the minimum, the Clinton Foundation should disclose every company that received investment funds from them, because the public is entitled to know whether those companies benefited from any State Department foreign-aid programs.”
Not to mention the ethical murk of having two charities co-own an investment fund in a developing nation.
Especially when one of those charities is the family nonprofit of a presidential candidate who has raised tens of millions from the financial sector she’s promising to reform.
Does Hillary Clinton have a nonhypocritical bone in her body?