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The Clintons Kazakhstan problem

An Ex-President, a Mining Deal and a Big Donor

By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
Published: January 31, 2008

Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.

Unlike more established competitors, 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. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.

Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, 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.

Within two days, corporate records show that 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’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, 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, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.

Mr. Giustra was invited to accompany the former president to Almaty just as the financier was trying to seal a deal he had been negotiating for months.

In separate written responses, both men said Mr. Giustra traveled with Mr. Clinton to Kazakhstan, India and China to see first-hand the philanthropic work done by his foundation.

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. Dzhakishev added that Kazatomprom chose to form a partnership with Mr. Giustra’s company based solely on the merits of its offer.

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Kazakhstan primer:

August 19, 2007
The WP's Peter Baker missed a few important insights in its piece on why Bush's democracy vision has stalled. The two biggest: Bush's vision of overturning tyranny and bringing democracy to Iraq has been dashed in massive sectarian bloodshed, loss of life, turmoil, insurgency, uncertainty and heartbreak and a massive devotion of US resources that might have gone to promoting grand things lots of places, and secondly, that in many targeted countries, promoting democracy would mean allowing Islamist groups, some designated as terrorist groups by the Bush administration, to prevail. The piece left out so many big examples of the contradictions -- Musharraf/Pakistan, Saudi Arabia whose corrupt royal family is so close to the White House and Cheney's office, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt -- of where Bush has decided he isn't quite sure he really wants democratic realities to be realized, and he just may prefer the tyrant, as Cheney openly does in Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. While the piece would seem to promote a few voices blaming the stalling of Bush's grand vision on the bureaucrats in the U.S. government, it also tried to save itself from total ingratiation with the White House by naming responsible the office of the vice president's "little-girl crush on strongmen." But how did it miss how corrupted and stalled and conflicted is the vision at the very top of the U.S. government -- with the president himself -- and the realities the president has found himself confronting? Bush is now using all the Sunni tyrants, the autocrats, royals and propped up, hardly a two of them democratically elected, to counter Iran, for instance. Bush have a hard time with the policy? Congress may be interested to know due to the $30 billion in military aid to those states it's being asked to approve by the Bush White House.

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Cheney promotes democratic reform everywhere but oil-rich Kazakhstan

By David Espo
ASSOCIATED PRESS

12:18 a.m. May 8, 2006

WASHINGTON – Vice President Dick Cheney made democratic reform his calling card throughout his just-completed overseas trip – everywhere except Kazakhstan, a land judged poor in human rights but rich in oil and gas.

“Obviously Kazakhstan is important given their considerable resources,” the vice president told reporters Sunday aboard Air Force Two on the way home. “It's one of the few places where we're going to see an increase in oil production from a non-OPEC state over the next few years.”

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James Love| BIO

The Well-Connected Dictator

This is about Nursultan Nazarbayev, the brutal and corrupt dictator of Kazakhstan and friend of politicians in high places, including three current and past U.S. presidents, Dick Cheney, presidential candidates from both parties, and heads of state everywhere.

While the butt of jokes in the movie Borat, Kazakhstan is more interesting and potentially important than many realize. Sparsely populated but vast in territory (ranked 9th globally), Kazakhstan is larger than all of Western Europe, endowed with enormous oil, gas and uranium resources, and has a government that aspires to be a leading global supplier of nuclear fuel and energy technologies.

Located in an unstable region, Kazakhstan shares a northern border with Russia, and an eastern border with China. To the south lie the authoritarian and corrupt states of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and close by are Tajikistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

High oil prices and rich mineral resources have create a bonanza for this former member of the USSR. According to Forbes, there are seven billionaires living in Kazakhstan, all of whom have close ties to Nazarbayev, including Nazarabyev's daughter Dinara Kulibaeva (2.1 billion) and her husband Timur Kulibaev (2.1) billion. Nazarbayev himself is rumored to be one of the richest men in the world, although no one knows exactly how rich, since he is alleged to have hidden interests in a variety of businesses.

The only President since independence in 1991, Nazarbayev has a long history of rigging elections, and destroying critics and opposition parties and leaders. Many of the critics of the regime have been imprisoned, beaten, murdered, or had their daughters kidnapped or killed. Nazarbayev himself is implicated in a US Department of Justice investigation into bribes paid by James Giffen, whose trial has been put on hold by the Bush administration. For details of corruption and the brutal treatment of critics of the regime, see this timeline.

None of this has stopped a long list of leading political figures from cozying up to the Kazakhstan government, or Nazarbayev personally.

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Vice President Dick Cheney met with Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan in May 2006, less than three months aftere the dramatic murder of opposition leader Altynbek Sarsenbaev.

September 2006, President George Bush shares a light moment with Nazarbayev at the White House.

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Will Bill's dough make trouble for Hillary?

Protecting Hillary: Bill Clinton Severs Business Ties With Billionaire Buddy Burkle

The Clintons' secrecy is going to comeback and bite them in the rear.