The Clinton Foundation and Haiti Contracts

The Clinton Foundation and Haiti Contracts

After the earthquake in 2010, the Clintons’ outsize influence in the small nation increased.

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the Wall Street Journal

The Clinton Foundation lists the Brazilian construction firm OAS and the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) as donors that have given it between $1 million and $5 million. Those relationships are worth learning more about.

OAS has been in the news because it is caught up in a corruption scandal centered on Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras. In November Brazilian police arrested three top OAS executives for their alleged roles in a bribery scheme involving inflated contracts and kickbacks. OAS denies the allegations. Closer to home the 2013 OAS donation to the Clinton Foundation deserves attention because of the power that Bill Clinton has in Haiti, where OAS has been awarded IDB contracts.

Development banks are the butt of jokes among economists because while they claim to fight poverty they are mostly good at empire building. The same might be said of the Clintons in Haiti. A few months after Hillary Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, Bill Clinton was named the U.N. special envoy to Haiti. That gave the Clintons a lot of power over U.S. foreign-aid decisions in the small country.

They accumulated more influence after the 2010 earthquake, when Bill was named co-chair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. The State Department began directing parties interested in competing for Haiti contracts to the Clinton Foundation. Being on the right side of Bill matters if you want to benefit from U.S. foreign aid destined for Haiti.

Mariela Antiga arrived in Haiti a few months before Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state. She had signed a three-year contract with the IDB as an in-country finance specialist whose job it was to ensure the integrity of the bidding process and the validity of the contracts. But in March 2010 the IDB told her to pack her bags and leave Haiti.

Ms. Antiga alleged that this violated her contract, and she filed a grievance with the IDB’s internal conciliation committee claiming that it was in retaliation for her failure to rubber-stamp projects that her bosses wanted. Ms. Antiga alleged that the bank emphasized spending money rather than results and said that she understood that part of her job was to strengthen internal controls.

The grievance proceeded to the IDB administrative tribunal where the bank denied any retaliation. The tribunal that heard her case was split on that point, making it inconclusive. The IDB says the law firm it hired to look into her allegations of mismanagement found them to be untrue, but the law firm’s report is confidential. As to why she was sent out of Haiti and her duties downsized, the tribunal’s judgment report said that her boss cited a poor attitude.

Ms. Antiga had objected to an April 2009 OAS road contract. Her concerns were echoed, according to the tribunal report, by two other employees. The Washington-based Government Accountability Project, which represented Ms. Antiga before the IDB tribunal, said she cited “excessive costs associated with a road no one needed” and “that the contract had been publicly announced two months before the approval process was complete.” The company declined to comment.

In another instance, according to the tribunal report, which was released in January, email traffic showed that there was an effort to rush through approval of a construction project on private land, which Ms. Antiga alleged belonged to close associates of President René Preval. Ms. Antiga’s objections seem to have stirred further opposition inside the bank, and the project did not go forward.

It’s possible that Ms. Antiga had an ax to grind. But some of her claims are documented and it is also possible she is telling the truth. In that case we are left to puzzle over why the bank would chase dubious deals and what if anything that had to do with efforts to be in with the Clintons, who held the Haiti purse strings.

The IDB’s gifts are perhaps easier to understand since the State Department plays a key role in approving the bank’s U.S. funding. The IDB told me in an email it made a 2014 donation to the Clinton Foundation of $150,000 for “The Future of the Americas Meeting.” Between 2009 and 2013 it donated another $925,000 to “finance expenses and activities” for the planning and design of “7 public policy forums . . . in which leaders on key topics relevant to the work of the Bank were able to exchange ideas, enhance their understanding and forge new and stronger partnerships.”

The problem with the Clintons in Haiti is that everywhere you go, they are there with the appearance of a conflict of interest. Haiti is unlikely to triumph over its long struggle against corruption when the U.S. government grants a former U.S. president wide power, with little oversight, to dispense hundreds of millions in the midst of such destitution.