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2015 Coverage

The Shady Foreigners Propping Up New York's Real Estate Market
Feb 9, 2015 | Fortune
By Chris Matthews

... Wang Wenliang: The construction mogul is also a former municipal official in the Chinese city of Dadong. His construction company, Rilin, was found by officials in Jersey City, N.J. to be illegally housing dozens of workers in cramped and unsanitary conditions. He owns a Time Warner condo through a shell company called Columbus Skyline.
Clinton Charity Tapped Foreign Friends
Mar 19, 2015 | The Wall Street Journal
By James Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus

... Rilin Enterprises, part of a privately held Chinese construction, infrastructure and port-management company, made a $2 million foundation pledge. The company was founded and is run by Wang Wenliang, a member of the National People’s Congress, China’s formal parliamentary body. Mr. Wang didn’t respond to a request to speak with him during the annual meeting earlier this month.
Chinese company pledged $2 million to Clinton Foundation in 2013
Mar 16, 2015 | CBS
By Julianna Goldman

A CBS News investigation has found that at least one foreign company with close ties to its government has been giving generously to the foundation run by Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
Stream of Foreign Wealth Flows to Elite New York Real Estate
Feb 7, 2015 | The New York Times
By Louise Story and Stephanie Saul

... Further searches turned up a prominent Wang Wenliang. This Mr. Wang is a former municipal official in Dandong, a city on China’s border with North Korea, and a member of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliamentary body. Among his businesses is a construction empire that has worked on numerous consulates and embassies for the Chinese government, and he is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He is on the board of trustees of N.Y.U., where he donated $25 million.
Clinton donors also pumped millions into McAuliffe’s coffers
Jul 29, 2015 | The Washington Post
By Laura Vozzella

Wang Wenliang is a delegate to China’s parliament whose construction conglomerate builds China’s embassies around the world and controls a strategic port near North Korea. He also is a big donor — seven figures to the Clinton Foundation and, through his firm’s New Jersey affiliate, six figures to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
Real estate needs further regulation
Feb 10, 2015 | Washington Square News
By WSN Editorial Board

The shell company Columbus Skyline, which bought three condos for a total of $25.6 million, was traced to NYU Board of Trustees member Wang Wenliang. In 2010, Wang donated $25 million to the university and founded the NYU Center on U.S.-China Relations.

"McAuliffe Campaign" Coverage

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe under federal investigation for campaign contributions
May 24, 2016 | CNN
By Evan Perez, Shimon Prokupecz and Pamela Brown

Virginia Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the FBI and prosecutors from the Justice Department's public integrity unit, U.S. officials briefed on the probe say.
Inquiry Highlights Terry McAuliffe’s Ties to Chinese Company
May 24, 2016 | The New York Times
By Nicholas Confessore and Stephanie Saul

Four years ago, one of China’s largest agricultural importers sent representatives to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., hoping that meetings with elite party officials might yield business opportunities. The company, the Dandong Port Group, was particularly focused on the governors in attendance, according to an interview with Dandong’s general counsel broadcast by Chinese state television.
Virginia's Governor — a Longtime Hillary Clinton Ally — Is Under Federal Investigation
May 24, 2016 | Vice News
By Sarah Mimms

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a close ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton, is reportedly under investigation by the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) over campaign contributions he received from a Chinese businessma
Authorities investigate whether Terry McAuliffe violated lobbying restrictions
May 27, 2016 | The Economist

TERRY MCAULIFFE—a long-term ally of Hillary Clinton—was elected governor of Virginia in 2013 because, as a Democrat, he represented a clean break from the corruption scandal that brought his Republican predecessor, Bob McDonnell, low.
EXCLUSIVE: Video footage showing Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe and Chinese billionaire Wang Wenliang at Hillary's house revealed as FBI probes campaign donations
May 26, 2016 | Daily Mail
By Geoff Earle

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe may not recall ever having met Chinese billionaire businessman Wang Wenliang, but he certainly spent some time inside the same well-appointed home – as exclusive footage obtained by Daily Mail Online reveals.
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe Invited Chinese Donor to Hillary Clinton’s Home
May 25, 2016 | Time
By Michael Scherer

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe invited the Chinese businessman whose donations to him have been named as a focus of Justice Department investigators to a 2013 fundraiser at Hillary Clinton’s personal Washington, D.C., residence.
Revealed: The State Department’s Hidden Hillary Donors
May 24, 2016 | The Daily Beast
By Shane Harris and Jackie Kucinich

Hillary Clinton may have suspended her political career temporarily when she became secretary of state. But the Clinton fundraising machine was in full swing and raising millions of dollars for the State Department under her watch, an analysis by The Daily Beast has found.
Shortchanged by loose money
May 28, 2016 | Daily Press

In a way, the leak of a supposed federal investigation into a campaign donation to Gov.Terry McAuliffe made no sense. In another, it made all the sense in the world.
Who is Wang Wenliang, Chinese businessman who donated to McAuliffe?
May 25, 2016 | The Roanoke Times
By Robert Zullo

In China, it’s called “guanxi,” translated as “connections” or “relationships.” “There is a long-standing tradition in Chinese culture and history of building relationships. And money can come into that as well,” said James Mann, a former foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and author of four books on U.S.-China relations who is currently an author-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University.
McAuliffe met Wang at least 3 times
May 26, 2016 | Daily Press
By Travis Fain

Gov. Terry McAuliffe met three times with the wealthy Chinese businessman wrapped up in controversy this week courtesy of media reports that the U.S. Department of Justice was probing his campaign contributions to the governor.
Clinton Ally Terry McAuliffe Investigated for 2013 Campaign Donations
May 23, 2016 | U.S News
By Gabrielle Levy

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a swing-state Democrat and close Clinton ally, is under investigation by the FBI and the Justice Department over donations to his 2013 gubernatorial campaign.
Did This Chinese Billionaire Try to Buy Hillary Clinton and Terry McAuliffe?
May 24, 2016 | The Daily Beast
By Betsy Woodruff, Gideon Resnick and Shane Harris

Details are vague, but the investigation involves Chinese billionaire businessman Wang Wenliang, who now has the rare distinction of causing problems for both McAuliffe and Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe's Campaign Fundraising Reportedly Under FBI Investigation
May 23, 2016 | Slate
By Elliot Hannon

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe is under investigation by the FBI and Justice Department to determine whether his 2013 gubernatorial campaign broke any fundraising laws, CNN reported Monday

Election Fraud in China

An Unlikely Crime in One-Party China: Election Fraud
Sep 14, 2016 | The New York Times
By Michael Forsythe

China’s legislature has expelled 45 of its members in a vote-buying scandal that has snared a prominent businessman who is active in donating to American universities, foundations and political campaigns.
Donor to Clinton Foundation, McAuliffe caught up in Chinese cash-for-votes scandal
Sep 16, 2016 | The Washington Post
By Laura Vozzella and Simon Denyer

Wang Wenliang, a Chinese billionaire and donor to the Clinton Foundation and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, has been expelled from China’s top legislature after being caught up in a widespread cash-for-votes scheme.
Major Clinton Foundation Donor Ensnared In Chinese Vote-Buying Scandal
Sep 15, 2016 | Daily Caller
By Chuck Ross

A Chinese billionaire who has contributed $2 million to the Clinton Foundation and attended a fundraiser at Hillary Clinton’s home in 2013 has been kicked out of China’s National People’s Congress on accusations of bribing his way into office.
Chinese Clinton Foundation Donor Prompts Attack on Hillary Clinton - Trump Camp
Sep 16, 2016 | Sputnik

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been compromised by a Chinese donor to the Clinton Foundation who is now ensnared in a vote-buying scandal in China, Trump campaign Senior Communications Advisor Jason Miller said in a statement on Thursday.
Voting scandal in China leads to dismissal of 45 national legislators
Sep 22, 2016 | Concordiensis
By Lisa Hladik

China’s national legislature voted to dismiss 45 of its members on September 13 due to allegations of voter fraud. These legislators were all representatives of China’s northeastern province of Liaoning, which is going through an economic downturn.

2015 Coverage

The Shady Foreigners Propping Up New York's Real Estate Market

Feb 9, 2015 | Fortune

By Chris Matthews

U.S. corporate law makes it easy for foreigners to stash their wealth stateside.
In a country beset by increasing wealth and income inequality, few places are more economically disparate than New York City.
Part of what drives income inequality in New York is that it’s an extremely attractive place for the global elite to live, or in many cases to park their vast fortunes. On Sunday,The New York Times published an 8,000-word investigationinto wealthy foreigners who buy New York real estate and take advantage of lax laws in the U.S. that allow them to set up shell companies so they don’t need to reveal their identities.
Many of these foreigners are corrupt businessmen and state officials of foreign countries who use U.S. tax laws to shield their wealth from creditors and courts in their home countries. The Times piece took an in depth look at this phenomenon, focusing on one luxury tower in particular: The Time Warner Center in Manhattan. While reasonable people might disagree over the effects of the influx of the super rich to the New York real estate market over the past generation, it’s tough for any honest American to stomach some the fact that U.S. law is so friendly to foreigners who want a place to stash their ill-gotten gains. Here are just a few examples of the wealthy foreigners who are using the U.S. tax code to evade justice:
Vitaly Malkin: This Russian oligarch and politician has been implicated in a variety of financial scandals, including profiting to the tune of $48 million from a restructuring of Angola’s national debt following a long civil war, which critics argue amounted to nothing more than a ripoff of Angolan taxpayers. Malkin bought a condo in the Time Warner Center for more than $15 million in 2010 through a shell company. The Times was able to learn that he was in fact the owner of the condo because he was involved in a lawsuit in which a contractor working on the condo was accused of over-billing.
Pablo Ardila: This former Colombian official was arrested by the Colombian government “on charges of enriching himself illicitly,” according to the Times. Though he was released from jail without being convicted, he is still under investigation by Colombian officials and he was able to sell the New York condo that he owned through a shell company while in jail without interference from the U.S. or Colombian governments.
Dimitrios Contominas: A former Greek government official, Contominas was arrested last year in a corruption sweep for the illegal use of company funds for personal benefit. He sold his Time Warner Center condo this year for more than $21 million.
Stewart Ford: The former CEO of investment firm Keydata Investment Services is being investigated by the British government for his involvement in his company’s 2009 collapse. The authorities allege that he transferred roughly $60 million from Keydata into funds owned by his family. Around the time of his company’s demise, Ford sold his New York apartment through a shell company that he owned.
Anil Agarnwal: The Indian billionaire mining mogul has been found by Indian courts to have illegally moved funds from his home country to shell companies in Mauritius and the Bahamas. On top of that, Agarnwal has come under intense scrutiny for his companies’ environmental record and their treatment of indigenous populations. The Timesinvestigation revealed that Agarnwal bought a Time Warner Center condo through a shell company for $9.1 million in 2004.
Wang Wenliang: The construction mogul is also a former municipal official in the Chinese city of Dadong. His construction company, Rilin, was found by officials in Jersey City, N.J. to be illegally housing dozens of workers in cramped and unsanitary conditions. He owns a Time Warner condo through a shell company called Columbus Skyline.
The rules that govern the shell companies these men have used to facilitate their real estate deals are set at the state level, and in most cases one can set up an LLC (limited liability corporations) without divulging his identity. This makes it nearly impossible for foreign governments and creditors to track down wealth stashed through LLCs in American real estate. Authorities usually discover these illicit funds when money launderers mess up. That was the case when the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan moved to seize the property of an LLC which sold some of its real estate holdings in order to bribe the first lady of Taiwan,according to a report last year by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
In 2010, Senators Carl Levin and Tom Coburn released an investigative report suggesting that the Congress should remove the Patriot Act’s money laundering exemptions given to real estate and legal officials. So far, the real estate industry has been successful in combating such changes.
http://fortune.com/2015/02/09/new-york-real-estate-foreign-criminals/

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Clinton Charity Tapped Foreign Friends

Mar 19, 2015 | The Wall Street Journal

By James Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus

Foundation agreed not to seek donations from other governments, but cash kept flowing from individuals with connections to them
The Clinton Foundation swore off donations from foreign governments when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. That didn’t stop the foundation from raising millions of dollars from foreigners with connections to their home governments, a review of foundation disclosures shows.
Some donors have direct ties to foreign governments. One is a member of the Saudi royal family. Another is a Ukrainian oligarch and former parliamentarian. Others are individuals with close connections to foreign governments that stem from their business activities. Their professed policy interests range from human rights to U.S.-Cuba relations.
All told, more than a dozen foreign individuals and their foundations and companies were large donors to the Clinton Foundation in the years after Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, collectively giving between $34 million and $68 million, foundation records show. Some donors also provided funding directly to charitable projects sponsored by the foundation, valued by the organization at $60 million.
After Mrs. Clinton left the State Department in 2013, the foundation resumed accepting donations from foreign governments. Just after she stepped down as secretary of state, it received a large donation from a conglomerate run by a member of China’s National People’s Congress.
In response to questions about foreign donations, a foundation official said the individuals have given to a host of other major philanthropies. “Like other global charities and nongovernmental organizations, the Clinton Foundation receives support from individuals all over the world because our programs are improving the lives of millions of people around the globe,” said spokesmanCraig Minassian.
The foreign donors reached by The Wall Street Journal said they contributed to the foundation for charitable, not political reasons.
The foundation’s efforts in health care, economic development and opportunity for women and girls are being touted by Mrs. Clinton as she prepares to embark on a campaign for the presidency.
“I’m very proud of the hundreds of thousands of people who support the work of the foundation and the results that have been achieved for people here at home and around the world,” she said last week.Political criticism
Mrs. Clinton has been criticized for donations to the charity that now also bears her name: the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The Journal’s report in February that the foundation had resumed accepting foreign-government donations prompted criticism from Republicans and some Democrats, who said it represented a conflict for a potential future president.
The foundation has said that if Mrs. Clinton runs for president, it would consider once again restricting donations from foreign governments. Also, under federal election law, foreign governments, individuals and corporations would be barred from giving to her campaign.
Former President Bill Clinton promised the Obama administration the foundation wouldn’t accept most foreign-government donations while his wife was secretary of state. The agreement didn’t place limits on donations from foreign individuals or corporations.
A precise donation tally isn’t possible because the foundation’s voluntary disclosure doesn’t provide dates and reports dollar amounts in ranges. The Journal tracked donations through foundation disclosures, watchdog reports and other media accounts.
Between 2009 and 2013, including when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation received at least $8.6 million from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, according to that foundation, which is based in Kiev, Ukraine. It was created by Mr. Pinchuk, whose fortune stems from a pipe-making company. He served two terms as an elected member of the Ukrainian Parliament and is a proponent of closer ties between Ukraine and the European Union.
Mr. Pinchuk and his wife—the daughter of former Ukraine President Leonid Kuchma—began donating to Clinton charities in 2006 after being introduced to Mr. Clinton byDoug Schoen, a pollster who has worked for both Clintons.
In 2008, Mr. Pinchuk made a five-year, $29 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative, a wing of the foundation that coordinates charitable projects and funding for them but doesn’t handle the money. The pledge was to fund a program to train future Ukrainian leaders and professionals “to modernize Ukraine,” according to the Clinton Foundation. Several alumni are current members of the Ukrainian Parliament. Actual donations so far amount to only $1.8 million, a Pinchuk foundation spokesman said, citing the impact of the 2008 financial crisis.
During Mrs. Clinton’s time at the State Department, Mr. Schoen, the pollster, registered as a lobbyist for Mr. Pinchuk, federal records show. Mr. Schoen said he and Mr. Pinchuk met several times with Clinton aides including Melanne Verveer, a Ukrainian-American and then a State Department ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. The purpose, Mr. Schoen said, was to encourage the U.S. to pressure Ukraine’s then-PresidentViktor Yanukovych to free his jailed predecessor, Yulia Tymoshenko.
Mr. Schoen said his lobbying was unrelated to the donations. “We were not seeking to use any leverage or any connections or anything of the sort relating to the foundation,” he said.
The Pinchuk foundation said its donations were intended to help to make Ukraine “a successful, free, modern country based on European values.” It said that if Mr. Pinchuk was lobbying the State Department about Ukraine, “this cannot be seen as anything but a good thing.”
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia wasn’t allowed to give to the foundation while Mrs. Clinton was at the State Department. But several prominent Saudi Arabian businessmen gave millions.Saudi money
Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former ambassador to the U.S. and member of the Saudi royal family who has attended annual meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative, made donations in 2013 and 2014, though exact dates aren’t available. Prince Turki met Bill Clinton decades ago when both were students at Georgetown University’s foreign-service school. Prince Turki’s chief of staff didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.
Another donor, Sheikh Mohammed H. Al Amoudi, an Ethiopian immigrant to Saudi Arabia, has donated between $5 million and $10 million, including while Mrs. Clinton served in the State Department. Mr. Al Amoudi has built an empire of construction, agricultural and energy companies across Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia. He also has endowed a breast-cancer institute at the government-run King Abdulaziz University and is a participant in Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Food Security Program.
His U.S. lawyer, George Salem, said his client “is a private Saudi citizen, and not a government official in Saudi Arabia.” He said there was “nothing inappropriate” about the donation, which was to fight AIDS in Ethiopia.
Among the other overseas givers:
• Joachim Schoss, a German investor who has met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other government officials to discuss Internet policy, has given between $1 million and $5 million, some of which came during Mrs. Clinton tenure at the State Department. A spokeswoman for Mr. Schoss said his donations were “purely philanthropic” and unrelated to politics.
• Venezuelan media mogul Gustavo Cisneros, who is active in Venezuelan politics and has long advocated restoring ties between the U.S. and Cuba, has given the foundation between $500,000 and $1 million, some during Mrs. Clinton’s stint at the State Department. He owns Venevisión, one of Venezuela’s largest television networks, once a staunch opponent of former President Hugo Chávez. Since Mr. Chávez’s death in 2013, Mr. Cisneros has maintained ties to the new president, Nicolás Maduro. A spokesman for Mr. Cisneros didn't respond to a request for comment.
• Victor Dahdaleh, a London businessman whose foundation contributed between $1 million and $5 million, has ties to Bahrain’s state-owned aluminum company. He was the intermediary between the state-owned Aluminum Bahrain B.S.C. and Alcoa World Alumina, which is majority owned by Alcoa Inc. Last year, he was acquitted in London on charges of bribing Bahraini officials to secure contracts for the Alcoa firm. In the U.S., the Alcoa affiliate pleaded guilty last year to corruption charges, and the Justice Department said an investigation into the matter remains open.
During the British trial, Mr. Dahdaleh’s lawyer acknowledged his client made payments to Bahraini officials but said they were legal. Another of his lawyers, Neil O’May, said the Alcoa affiliate’s U.S. guilty plea “does not detract from Mr. Dahdaleh’s acquittal by a competent court in the U.K.”
Donations for foreigners with government ties continued flowing in after Mrs. Clinton left the State Department.Chinese donation
Rilin Enterprises, part of a privately held Chinese construction, infrastructure and port-management company, made a $2 million foundation pledge. The company was founded and is run by Wang Wenliang, a member of the National People’s Congress, China’s formal parliamentary body. Mr. Wang didn’t respond to a request to speak with him during the annual meeting earlier this month.
Mr. Wang is the former municipal official of Dandong, a city of 2.4 million in the Liaoning province on China’s border with North Korea. His company now controls that city’s port, a major trade route into North Korea.
The Clinton Foundation was unaware Mr. Wang was a delegate to the NPC, said a foundation official.
Mr. Wang’s spokeswoman, Abigail Gardner, said he “has a long history of generous philanthropic giving to institutions of higher education and organizations that work on and promote global relations.”
One of Mr. Wang’s firms was a contractor for the new Chinese Embassy in Washington. His company also has made donations to Singapore, Harvard and New York Universities as well as the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-charity-tapped-foreign-friends-1426818602

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Chinese company pledged $2 million to Clinton Foundation in 2013

Mar 16, 2015 | CBS

By Julianna Goldman

A CBS News investigation has found that at least one foreign company with close ties to its government has been giving generously to the foundation run by Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
Since its founding, the Clinton Foundation has invested millions each year for work in fighting AIDS and empowering women, but its recent uptick in donations from foreign governments has been raising questions about the potential influence on Hillary Clinton, as she gets ready to run for president.
The foundation has raised at least $42 million from foreign governments - and according to an analysis by CBS News - at least $170 million from foreign entities and individuals.
One donor - Rilin Enterprises- pledged $2 million in 2013 to the Clinton Foundation's endowment. The company is a privately-held Chinese construction and trade conglomerate and run by billionaire Wang Wenliang, who is also a delegate to the Chinese parliament. Public records show the firm has spent $1.4 million since 2012, lobbying Congress and the State Department. The firm owns a strategic port along the border with North Korea and was also one of the contractors that built the Chinese embassy in Washington.
That contract is a direct tie to the Chinese government, according to Jim Mann, who has written several books on China's relationship with the U.S.
With "embassy construction, one of the most important tasks is making sure that there are no bugs there," he said. "So you want to have the closest security and intelligence connections with and approval of the person or company that's going to build your embassy."
The Clinton Foundation largely stopped taking money from foreign governments when Hillary Clinton became secretary of state in 2009. It resumed the practice once she left in 2013, but never stopped taking money from foreign companies or individuals.
In a statement, the foundation said that should Hillary Clinton run for president "we will continue to ensure the Foundation's policies and practices regarding support from international partners are appropriate, just as we did when she served as Secretary of State."
But since the foundation never stopped taking money from foreign companies and individuals, even if the foundation were to return to the policies and practices in place while she was secretary, the launch of a Clinton presidential bid wouldn't preclude an individual, like Wang - with direct ties to the government - from contributing money. Further complicating Clinton's ties to her family foundation, is that when she was secretary of state, the foundation had a built-in infrastructure - in the State Department and the White House - to vet donations from foreign entities. That mechanism hasn't traditionally existed within a presidential candidate's campaign stricture.
The Rilin donation came at a time when the Clintons were aggressively raising money and when it was no secret she was readying a run for the White House. It underscores the types of questions the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign will have to answer as they reevaluate their policies.
"If the point is you are not going to take money from foreign governments, then his construction company is as close to not just the Chinese government, but its Ministry of State Security as they could possibly be," said Mann.How detailed was Clinton's process for deleting emails?Who should be in charge of handing over Hillary Clinton's emails?
"Indirectly the Clinton Foundation has political influence, that's why people give to it," said Mann. "People give to the Clinton Foundation particularly because it is the Clintons and because they are prominent politicians in the United States."
A Rilin spokesperson said Wang "was asked to join the NPC [National People's Congress], a largely ceremonial body, as a delegate in 2013."
Wang has given tens of millions of dollars to other organizations, including New York University, where he's a member of its Board of Trustees. In a statement, the Rilin spokesperson said, "Mr. Wang has a long history of generous philanthropic giving to institutions of higher education and organizations that work on and promote global relations. The Clinton Foundation is one of the many organizations Mr. Wang has donated to."
Rilin, however, has a history of complaints since 2001 regarding its treatment of embassy construction workers. Documents obtained by CBS News show Rilin was cited in 2011 and 2013 by officials in Jersey City, New Jersey for housing workers in unsafe, crowded and unsanitary conditions. The company settled the 2011 violations for $6,066 and says all the charges related to the 2013 inspection were dismissed.
Among the Clinton Foundation foreign donors, there are also a number that have come under fire from US agencies. Barclays Capital has given at least $1 million dollars to the foundation and last year, HSBC Holdings gave the foundation at least $500,000. Both British banks are under Justice Department investigations.
Asked about donations from foreign governments last week, Hillary Clinton defended the foundation's work, saying "I think that to people who want to support the foundation, know full well what it is we stand for and what we're working on."
Campaign finance laws prohibit foreign interests from investing in U.S. elections to prevent foreigners from buying political influence at home, but those rules don't apply to the Clinton Foundation. Bill Allison, senior policy analyst at the Sunlight Foundation, a campaign finance watchdog group, says the Clinton foundation is a unique non-profit that can't be separated from the US political system.
"If there is foreign money coming into the Clinton Foundation, it will raise the question of - is the president going to be doing favors for a foreign business, a foreign government, a foreign individual? And you just cannot have that in the American system of government, where the president is supposed to represent the American people," Allison said.
Clinton officials say that many major institutions - financial, media, industrial or otherwise - have been subject to investigation at some point. They said many of these organizations are capable of significant and positive impact and the investigations alone shouldn't preclude them from contributing to improving lives.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-company-pledged-2-million-to-clinton-foundation-in-2013/

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Stream of Foreign Wealth Flows to Elite New York Real Estate

Feb 7, 2015 | The New York Times

By Louise Story and Stephanie Saul

On the 74th floor of the Time Warner Center, Condominium 74B was purchased in 2010 for $15.65 million by a secretive entity called 25CC ST74B L.L.C. It traces to the family of Vitaly Malkin, a former Russian senator and banker who was barred from entering Canada because of suspected connections to organized crime.
Last fall, another shell company bought a condo down the hall for $21.4 million from a Greek businessman named Dimitrios Contominas, who was arrested a year ago as part of a corruption sweep in Greece.
A few floors down are three condos owned by another shell company, Columbus Skyline L.L.C., which belongs to the family of a Chinese businessman and contractor named Wang Wenliang. His construction company was found housing workers in New Jersey in hazardous, unsanitary conditions.
Behind the dark glass towers of the Time Warner Center looming over Central Park, a majority of owners have taken steps to keep their identities hidden, registering condos in trusts, limited liability companies or other entities that shield their names. By piercing the secrecy of more than 200 shell companies, The New York Times documented a decade of ownership in this iconic Manhattan way station for global money transforming the city’s real estate market.
Many of the owners represent a cross-section of American wealth: chief executives and celebrities, doctors and lawyers, technology entrepreneurs and Wall Street traders.
But The Times also found a growing proportion of wealthy foreigners, at least 16 of whom have been the subject of government inquiries around the world, either personally or as heads of companies. The cases range from housing and environmental violations to financial fraud. Four owners have been arrested, and another four have been the subject of fines or penalties for illegal activities.
The foreign owners have included government officials and close associates of officials from Russia, Colombia, Malaysia, China, Kazakhstan andMexico.
They have been able to make these multimillion-dollar purchases with few questions asked because of United States laws that foster the movement of largely untraceable money through shell companies.
Vast sums are flowing unchecked around the world as never before — whether motivated by corruption, tax avoidance or investment strategy, and enabled by an ever-more-borderless economy and a proliferation of ways to move and hide assets.
Alighting in places like London, Singapore and other financial centers, this flood of capital has created colonies of the foreign super-rich, with the attendant resentments and controversies about class inequality made tangible in the glass and steel towers reordering urban landscapes.
Where it made landfall in New York, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, was the Time Warner Center. More than a decade on, even as a row of sky-piercing palaces rises on the southern rim of Central Park, the Time Warner Center remains the New York archetype of the global phenomenon, reflecting intertwined trends — the increasing sums of foreign money in high-end real estate and the growing use of shell companies.
About $8 billion is spent each year for New York City residences that cost more than $5 million each, more than triple the amount of a decade ago, according to the website PropertyShark. Just over half of those sales last year were to shell companies.Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
The Times examination reveals the workings of an opaque economy for this global wealth. Lacking incentive or legal obligation to identify the sources of money, an entire chain of people involved in high-end real estate sales — lawyers, accountants, title brokers, escrow agents, real estate agents, condo boards and building workers — often operate with blinders on. As Rudy Tauscher, a former manager of the condos at Time Warner, said: “The building doesn’t know where the money is coming from. We’re not interested.”
As an indication of how well-cloaked shell company ownership is, it took The Times more than a year to unravel the ownership of shell companies with condos in the Time Warner Center, by searching business and court records from more than 20 countries, interviewing dozens of people with close knowledge of the complex, examining hundreds of property records and connecting the dots from lawyers or relatives named on deeds to the actual buyers.
Yet in some cases it is nearly impossible to establish with certainty the source of money behind shell companies. Purchasers can register shell companies in the names of accountants, lawyers or relatives. Purchases are often made not just by individuals but on behalf of groups of investors or numerous family members, further obscuring the origin of the funds. What is more, ownership of shell companies can be shifted at any time, with no indication in property records.
The high-end real estate market has become less and less transparent — and more alluring for those abroad with assets they wish to keep anonymous — even as the United States pushes other nations to help stanch the flow of American money leaving the country to avoid taxes. Yet for all the concerns of law enforcement officials that shell companies can hide illicit gains, regulatory efforts to require more openness from these companies have failed.
“We like the money,” said Raymond Baker, the president of Global Financial Integrity, a Washington nonprofit that tracks the illicit flow of money. “It’s that simple. We like the money that comes into our accounts, and we are not nearly as judgmental about it as we should be.”
In some ways, officials are clamoring for the foreign wealthy. In New York, tax breaks for condominium developments benefit owners looking for a second, or third, residence in one of Manhattan’s premier buildings. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on his weekly radio program in 2013, shortly before leaving office: “If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend.”
Among the Time Warner Center owners identified by The Times are at least 17 billionaires on Forbes magazine’s annual list of the world’s richest people. Five of the world’s leading art collectors own units, as do eight people who have been chief executives of major companies. And it has been home to numerous celebrities, including the singers Jimmy Buffett and Ricky Martin, the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and the talk show host Kelly Ripa.
A look behind some doors revealed more complicated tales.
Units 72B and 51E are owned by the Amantea Corporation, which The Times traced to a mining magnate named Anil Agarwal. His company was fined for polluting a major river near a copper mine in Zambia, which sickened nearby residents. And judicial committees in his native Indiadetermined that his company had violated the land rights of an indigenous tribe near a proposed mine.
When Anna Ai Fang purchased Condominium 58E in 2004 for $2.1 million, the forwarding address on the deed was a decidedly more modest location: her dorm, Ruggles Hall, at Columbia University. At the time, her father, Fang Fenglei, had ended a long career running state-affiliated banks in China and would soon begin working for Goldman Sachs.
Unit 62CE belongs to Prime International Management Group, which in turn is controlled by Alexander Varshavsky, who runs auto dealerships in Russia.
Few, if any, questions were raised by those involved in the deal when Mr. Varshavsky paid cash for the 4,300-square-foot apartment. But his condo shopping did not go unnoticed.
“Agents observed defendant Varshavsky enter several buildings in the Central Park area with a real estate agent, including 25 Columbus Circle, New York, New York,” according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Newark, recounting surveillance by federal agents at the Time Warner Center. “In June 2011 defendant Varshavsky purchased an apartment located at that address for approximately $20.5 million in cash.”
In December 2013, Mr. Varshavsky, who is now a United States citizen, was charged with failing to report the existence of a foreign bank account. A lawyer for Mr. Varshavsky disputed the allegations and said he expected the complaint to be dropped.
Meanwhile the case is pending, and Mr. Varshavsky posted bail — his Time Warner condo.OWNERSHIP BECOMES OPAQUE
It was not all that long ago that Columbus Circle was the makeshift residence of dozens of homeless people squatting at the site of the abandoned New York Coliseum, the Robert Moses-era convention center.
The demolition of the coliseum and the creation of the Time Warner Center — two residential towers with a retail atrium, corporate offices and theMandarin Oriental Hotel — transformed the area into a vibrant shopping and dining destination in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The condos also sparked development of a billionaires row of residential towers overlooking Central Park.
By marketing the condos to wealthy foreigners, Time Warner’s developer was at the forefront of luring cash from overseas to New York real estate. Twenty-six percent of the original sales were to people from other countries, a proportion that has grown to more than half among recent buyers. The complex’s dark glass exterior offers a sheen of both exclusivity and secrecy.
It is no more transparent inside. There are no door buzzers or mail slots with residents’ names. You are unlikely to bump into neighbors wandering the halls because only about a third of the owners live there at any one time, according to people familiar with their comings and goings. The building’s annual holiday party is a lonely affair, they say.
“It’s a really closely guarded secret who is in that building,” said Al D’Elia, an architect who has worked there. “It’s just the way they treat you, what you have to do to get in the building.”
The hallways are spare, but many apartments are loaded with the sort of amenities that have become standard in luxury real estate: panoramic views, stone bathtubs and custom everything — sound systems, millwork, lighting fixtures.
Even the numbering of the floors was a bit of upwardly mobile sleight of hand, calibrated to enhance the perception of what the developer, the Related Companies, marketed as “Five Star Living.” So, the 80th-floor penthouses are actually on 53.
The building’s layout and protocols facilitate anonymity. There are multiple entrances to its 192 condos — not just through the two towers’ main doors, but also through an adjacent parking garage and through the Time Warner Center shops. And while the building has a book listing the names of people associated with units, the owners do not have to be listed for them to get access to the building. They could walk in alongside someone whose name is in the book. Or, if they are cleared to visit, they could enter the complex through the shops or the hotel, and then take the secure elevators to the condos.
“An owner could be obscured from our view,” said David Spector, who helped manage the condos until 2011.
Over the decade since the Time Warner condos came on the market, high-end real estate sales in general have become increasingly opaque. In 2003, one-third of the units sold in Time Warner were purchased by shell companies. By 2014, that figure was over 80 percent.
Across the United States in recent years, nearly half the residential purchases of over $5 million were made by shell companies rather than named people, according to data from First American Data Tree analyzed by The Times.
Public records, dating back to at least the 1800s in New York, set real estate apart as more transparent than bank accounts or stock portfolios. “There’s a whole Jeffersonian rhetoric about land ownership,” said Hendrik Hartog, a professor of the history of American law at Princeton. “There was a goal to make land transparent, and it was justified by civic values and a whole range of moral judgments like not hiding ownership.”
One type of corporate structure now commonly used in real estate transactions, limited liability companies, or L.L.C.s, did not even exist in the United States before the late 1970s. At first, they were primarily used by oil and gas traders in Wyoming to shield individual owners from liability — if, say, a well worker was hurt — and to avoid taxation of both the company and the investor.
Nothing in the genesis of limited liability companies suggested they would be used to purchase personal real estate, said Susan Pace Hamill, a University of Alabama professor who worked on L.L.C. policy while at the Internal Revenue Service in the 1990s. However, L.L.C.s are now commonly used in real estate for privacy, wealth transfer or shared ownership.
What becomes clear combing real estate records is that many Time Warner buyers have taken even greater steps, beyond using L.L.C.s, to keep their names out of sight. On many deeds, the line for the buyer’s signature is left blank, is illegible or is signed by a lawyer or other representative. Phone numbers are registered under lawyers’ names; the owner’s line on renovation permits is signed by Time Warner staff members; tax statements are addressed to the L.L.C.s.
And because most of the sales are in cash, there are few mortgage statements, another public document that might identify an owner or trigger scrutiny.
A spokeswoman for the Related Companies, Joanna Rose, said the developer had followed all federal and local laws in its sales at the Time Warner Center, adding, “With all of our sales, we know the identity of the purchasers.”
However, documents and interviews with a half-dozen people involved in the sales show that in many cases, the company did not know the actual source of the money behind the sales.
David J. Wine, the former vice chairman of the Related Companies, spoke bluntly of the lack of concern with buyers’ identities. “You pretty much go by financial capacity,” Mr. Wine said. “Can they afford it? They sign the contract, they put their money down with no contingency and they close. They have to show the money, and that is it. I don’t think you will find a single new developer where it’s different.”
Real estate agents say commitment to anonymity is essential. “One thing of being a high-end broker is we have to protect the privacy of our clients,” said Hall F. Willkie, president of Brown Harris Stevens. “If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have them as clients. We’re very much like private bankers in that sense.”
The shift to secrecy also reflects a fundamental change in the ownership structure of luxury real estate in New York. Many of Manhattan’s finest addresses were traditionally organized as co-ops in which residents were joint owners of the building. Co-op boards generally prefer full-time residents and often subject would-be buyers to excruciating scrutiny.
“Those co-ops wouldn’t accept billionaires, especially foreigners,” said Raphael De Niro, a broker at Douglas Elliman.
By contrast, Time Warner and most new luxury buildings are condos; residents own individual units and boards have less power to screen prospective buyers. In addition, at the Time Warner Center and many other buildings, if a condo board rejects a buyer, building rules say all the residents have to chip in to buy the unit, creating a disincentive for the board to be too picky.
“That’s the joy of the condos,” said Julie Maxey-Allison, an agent for Brown Harris Stevens. “That’s why the L.L.C.s buy them. It’s a way foreigners can do whatever they want here.”
In fact, interviews show, condo boards are not always aware of the individuals behind the shell companies.
Seamus McMahon, a former Time Warner owner, said he had no idea units were sold to members of the Saudi royal family while he was on the board in 2006, including one connected to Princess Haifa bint Faisal, the daughter of a former Saudi king, and her husband, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former ambassador to the United States. A few years earlier, Princess Haifa had been in the news because of reports that some of her money had gone to a figure who aided the Sept. 11 hijackers. (The United States commission that investigated the attacks found no evidence that the money assisted the hijackers, either directly or indirectly.)
Mr. McMahon said the Related Companies did not usually share details about buyers with board members and did not inform them of the Saudi sale. “They probably asked to keep it quiet,” he said, referring to the Saudis. “Related would have kept it quiet.”BEHIND DOOR 74B
When the company with the complicated name of 25CC ST74B plunked down $15.65 million in 2010 for a condo in the Time Warner Center, there was no telling whose money was in play.
But in January 2013, the company accused a contractor of overbilling in a classic New York City renovation dispute. The lawsuit identified the apartment’s owner as “Vitaly Malkin, a Russian senator who is domiciled in Russia and generally is not present in New York.” Less than two weeks later, a new complaint was filed with a change: It now said the apartment was owned by a trust whose beneficiaries included Mr. Malkin’s son, Leonid, and that Mr. Malkin was neither a trustee nor a beneficiary of the trust.
In a deposition, a former employee of the contractor said that while he understood that the client was “the senator, the Russian oligarch,” he was not allowed to refer to the client by name. If he did use the family name, he said he was reprimanded and told “to make sure I just used 25CC.”
In fact, Vitaly Malkin had been in public view for more than a decade, sometimes tied to controversy.
Mr. Malkin, 62, made a fortune in metals and banking and was one of the wealthiest members of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper legislative house. He resigned from the Council in March 2013 after Aleksei Navalny, the Russian anticorruption activist, revealed that he had failed to disclose property he owned in Canada and that he had dual Israeli citizenship.
But the case that has dogged Mr. Malkin involves a 1996 deal to restructure Angola’s $5 billion debt to Russia, an arrangement that has become a symbol of official plundering in Africa among anticorruption advocates.
The debt, incurred during Angola’s long civil war, was cut to $1.5 billion in a deal partly negotiated by Arcadi Gaydamak, a Russian-born businessman. But the debt payment was conveyed through an intermediary company in which Mr. Malkin had a share, according to documents from the Canadian government and Swiss investigators.
When Angola paid the debt, Mr. Gaydamak received $130 million of the payment and Mr. Malkin received $48.8 million, the documents show. A portion also went to various Angolan officials, including President José Eduardo dos Santos, who received $36 million, according to a report by the advocacy group Corruption Watch.
Mr. dos Santos and Mr. Gaydamak did not respond to inquiries from The Times.
“Everyone knew exactly what happened,” Rafael Marques, an Angolan journalist and activist, said of the payment to the president. “That money was for personal enrichment. They were kickbacks.”
The episode became an issue for Mr. Malkin in 2007, when he tried to gain entry to Canada, where he had business interests. Two years earlier, a Canadian immigration official had deemed Mr. Malkin “inadmissible,” writing that he had “massively misrepresented” his net worth and how he obtained his assets, according to court documents obtained by The Times.
When Mr. Malkin reapplied in 2007, among the issues was his role as Mr. Gaydamak’s banker in the Angola debt deal, the documents show. In addition to facing questions in the debt deal, Mr. Gaydamak was under investigation in France in connection with arms sales to the Angolan government. He was later sentenced to three years in a French prison for money laundering and tax fraud.
Canadian immigration officials again declared Mr. Malkin inadmissible, this time because of what they called an “extended association with persons suspected to be involved in organized crime and money laundering.”
In court papers, Mr. Malkin vehemently denied involvement in organized crime, calling the allegations by the Canadian authorities unsupported and noting that he had been free to travel to other countries. Mr. Malkin sued the Canadian authorities, and in June 2009 a judge ruled that the case should be reviewed because Mr. Malkin had not been given a chance to respond to the allegations.
Mr. Malkin was allowed to visit Canada in 2012, his lawyer, Gregory Sidlofsky of Toronto, said in an email, adding, “Canadian authorities never had nor provided any evidence of any wrongdoing by Mr. Malkin.” In the Angola debt case, he said, Swiss investigators ultimately found no wrongdoing. Mr. Sidlofsky said the $48.8 million was a dividend reflecting his client’s share of the intermediary company. As for the long-running renovation of the Time Warner condo, he said, “Mr. Malkin does not own the apartment, nor has he had any recent involvement in the renovation.”
The American Bar Association suggests that government officials like Mr. Malkin warrant enhanced scrutiny in real estate deals, but its guidelines are voluntary. Marc Isaacs, the New York lawyer who handled the condo purchase, said his firm’s client vetting goes beyond an online search, but he would not elaborate. Asked about Mr. Malkin, Mr. Isaacs said he could not discuss specific clients.
The real estate agents on the Time Warner deal included Brenda S. Powers and Elizabeth L. Sample, who represent many foreign clients and who live in the building. Ms. Sample said that her focus when vetting buyers was this: “They have to have the money. Other than that, that’s it. That’s all we need.”A BLIND EYE
Federal banking guidelines are clear: “Banks should take all reasonable steps to ensure that they do not knowingly or unwittingly assist in hiding or moving the proceeds of corruption.” This means screening customers to determine whether they are “politically exposed people” — foreign officials and their relatives and associates — and filing a “suspicious activity report” if the customers transfer unusually large amounts of money.
But such checks are not required on money flowing into the country through shell companies to purchase high-end real estate.
L.L.C.s and other entities can be established in various states without revealing their true owners. Even when such companies move money through a bank account, banks are not required to know who is behind the transaction because of a loophole in the law.
In many ways, the government has allowed the real estate industry to turn a blind eye to the source of money used to buy luxury properties.
It might not have turned out this way. In the late 1990s, after congressional hearings highlighted corrupt foreign officials with money in the United States, the Justice Department sought to expand the list of industries required to screen the financial activities of politically exposed people. That included jewelry sales, hedge funds and real estate.
The proposal gained momentum after Sept. 11, when the Justice Department pushed to make it part of the Patriot Act. The rules were included in the law and handed to the Treasury Department to put into effect.
The real estate and legal professions sprang into action, arguing that background checks were impractical and would hurt the economy. “The money-laundering risks presented by real estate closings are relatively small, compared to other types of financial assets,” the American Land Title Association said in comments on the proposed rules.
Businesses insisted that tainted money was not likely to flow into real estate. “Anonymity and liquidity, two characteristics important to money launderers, typically do not exist in real estate transactions,” the Dechert law firm wrote.
The industry’s assertions ignored the increasing use of shell companies and how often wealthy foreigners sought out high-end real estate as a safe deposit box.
At the Time Warner Center, for instance, at least a dozen purchases would have received greater scrutiny under the expanded rules.
But the Treasury Department never imposed the requirement on real estate or some other industries. Similarly, a proposal to extend the concept of the “know your customer” banking rule to the identities of people behind L.L.C.s and other shell companies that open bank accounts has been stalled for nearly three years in the Treasury Department.
Banking associations say it would impose undue costs on them because there are no reliable federal or state databases with shell company owners.
In fact, registering shell companies has become profitable for states like Delaware and Nevada, which also have lobbied against transparency.
“I don’t see some kind of global effort to stop all this because the money’s too good,” said David M. Crane, a Syracuse University law professor who oversaw the United Nations’ effort to recover money from Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president who was convicted of war crimes and thought to have plundered his country.
A number of states do not require people forming companies to reveal the names of the owners or show any identification.
This opacity presents challenges for law enforcement officials, who say billions of dollars in suspicious money move through shell companies each year. “It can be very, very difficult to penetrate who is the beneficial owner of these shell companies,” said Leslie R. Caldwell, chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division.
She said that the department’s Kleptocracy Initiative has found that foreign officials often use shell companies or immediate family members to move large amounts of money to United States real estate.
In 2010, a Senate committee investigating corrupt money moving into the country drew attention to a shell company used by the sister of the president of Gabon to buy a $2 million residence in Manhattan, and to an L.L.C. used by the son of the president of Equatorial Guinea to purchase a $30 million home in Malibu, Calif.
The proliferation of shell companies incorporated in the United States has hurt Washington’s attempt to get other countries to crack down on Americans who move money offshore to avoid taxes.
“We are in a totally inconsistent position,” said Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who pushed for transparency in shell companies when he served in the Senate. “We’re way behind in terms of keeping up with what the international standard is, and it weakens our argument when we go to try to crack down the use of these offshore tax havens.”
About a year ago, after the Group of 8 industrialized nations issued goals requiring identification of shell company owners, a British representative met with Justice Department officials to complain about the United States’ failure to comply.
According to two people at the meeting, the British representative, Dominic Martin, delivered a stern message: The lax American laws were being used by other countries as an excuse for inaction.
Such a message resonates with Justice Department officials who have advocated tightening the rules.
“For a long time we’ve taken the view that you have to focus on the people that manage the gateway to the financial system, and those guys are not only the banks,” said Stefan Cassella, a Justice Department lawyer. “Bad guys who are trying to invest money in the financial system — they use lawyers, they use accountants, they use real estate, they use jewelers and private jets.”TRANSACTIONS AMID INVESTIGATIONS
Just two months after the collapse of the Ponzi scheme run by Bernard L. Madoff in 2008, another Ponzi schemer was arrested: James Nicholson, whose Time Warner condominium was frozen. Mr. Nicholson’s $8.5 million unit would become the only one in the complex to be seized and sold off by law enforcement officials, even though other owners have been accused of wrongdoing. The difference is that Mr. Nicholson is an American citizen.
Foreigners who buy real estate in the United States often have an easier time keeping it out of the reach of investigators, victims and plaintiffs back home.
Take the case of Pablo Ardila, a former provincial governor in Colombia known for hunting trophies and lavish spending. Mr. Ardila acknowledged to The Times in 2004 that he and his parents had set up a shell company to buy a $4 million condo in the building. In 2007, while he was in office, Mr. Ardila was arrested and immediately jailed by local officials on charges of enriching himself illicitly.
While Mr. Ardila was behind bars, the shell company sold the condo, making a $2 million profit. By then, the forwarding address on property records was no longer in Colombia, but went to a Jhon Ballesteros, in Weston, Fla. John Burger, a real estate agent who represented the seller, said recently that he did not know Mr. Ardila was involved.
An extensive Colombian government analysis of Mr. Ardila’s holdings filed in court failed to unearth the Time Warner condo.
Despite international agreements, the authorities in smaller countries have difficulty recovering assets from abroad. “Judges in Colombia have been struggling a lot to get this money back to Colombia,” said Elisabeth Ungar Bleier, executive director of the Colombia branch of Transparency International, an anticorruption nonprofit.
Mr. Ardila was released from jail after two years and nine months without having been convicted. However, Arnulfo Mendez Castro, a spokesman for Colombian prosecutors, said Mr. Ardila was still under investigation.
Mr. Ardila’s lawyer, Mauricio Cristancho, said his client was the victim of “an absurd prosecution.” Despite what Mr. Ardila had told The Times about the condo, the lawyer said, the unit belonged to Mr. Ardila’s father, a wealthy businessman. He said Mr. Ballesteros, who did not reply to inquiries, was an assistant to the family.
The Ardila condo was not the only foreign-owned unit in Time Warner that was sold after an owner faced an investigation.
Mr. Contominas, the Greek businessman, sold his condo nine months after he was arrested in January 2014 and accused of using a commercial loan for personal expenditures. His lawyer, Grigorios Tsolias, said Mr. Contominas “is strongly denying any criminal accusation.”
Stewart Ford, another Time Warner owner, was facing a fraud investigation in October 2010 when he transferred the $6 million condominium he had bought in his own name to a shell company. At the time, Mr. Ford’s firm, Keydata Investment Services, was at the center of one of the biggest financial collapses in Britain, with an estimated 30,000 victims.
That summer, it had been revealed that he had transferred close to $60 million out of Keydata investments before his company was put in receivership by the British government, and moved it into shell companies and trusts that benefited his family.
Phil Burbidge, a disabled former teacher, said he invested through Keydata in 2008 but lost his life savings when the firm imploded the next year. “I’m in complete and utter poverty,” Mr. Burbidge said. “It’s all gone. I can’t even mend the roof.”
British financial authorities have concluded their investigation and notified Mr. Ford that they plan to take enforcement action, a spokesman for the British Financial Conduct Authority said in an email to The Times.
Mr. Ford, in turn, is appealing the authority’s decision, the spokesman said. In an interview, Mr. Ford said the government should not have put his company into receivership. He added that the funds he transferred out of Keydata investments were fees legitimately owed to entities his family controlled.
He has since sold the Time Warner condo.
Mr. Ford’s critics say he appears adept at keeping his assets out of reach of the authorities and bereft investors.
“We don’t believe he’s got any assets that are touchable,” said Geoff Hartnell, a financial adviser in Britain who invested in Keydata products and also sold them to 70 clients. “First of all, we know that he had trusts set up in the Dutch Antilles, trusts in Tortola, in the Virgin Islands.” He added: “If they turn around and fine him, then he says, ‘I’m not going to pay it.’ Since it’s civil, what can they do?”
Even a computer server in the company’s office proved difficult for the authorities to examine. When British regulators seized it, Mr. Ford sued and said he did not own it. In fact, it was owned by a company that promoted Scottish culture, which in turn was owned by a shell company that was 70 percent owned by a trust, which, it was eventually revealed, was set up for Mr. Ford’s four children.ANONYMOUS IN NEW YORK
Like most Time Warner owners, Anil Agarwal, an Indian mining magnate, is anonymous in New York. While interviews and private documents reviewed by The Times confirm he is behind condos purchased by the Amantea Corporation for $9.1 million in 2004, his name appears nowhere on public records. The deeds for Amantea’s Time Warner condos — one on the “maids floor” and another with sweeping views of Central Park — are signed by a New York lawyer named Constance Cranch. When contacted, she said: “You cannot say anything with respect to me. It’s a client of mine’s apartment, and I pay their bills.”
For all the secrecy at Time Warner, Mr. Agarwal is hardly private about his wealth. He spends much of his time in London and told a newspaper in 2005: “I have to have a Bentley, the best of chauffeurs and butlers.”
But Mr. Agarwal and his company, Vedanta Resources, are known in some parts of the world for having left financial and environmental problems in their wake.
He moved his company from India to London in the late 1990s, after it was banned from the Mumbai stock exchange for involvement in a prominent insider trading case. An Indian judge later overturned the ban, saying that there was insufficient evidence of a connection to the trading, and that India’s securities regulator did not have the power to impose the penalty. The regulator is still appealing that ruling, a spokesman said.
Ten months before he closed on his Time Warner condos, Mr. Agarwal, his father and his brother were found to have illegally moved money out of India using shell companies in Mauritius and the Bahamas. The Agarwals, an Indian judge later wrote, “tried to pull wool over the revenue’s eyes and manipulated foreign exchange.”
There were also complaints about Vedanta’s environmental record and treatment of residents near its operations.
In September 2004, an Indian Supreme Court committee stated that Vedanta had dumped thousands of tons of “arsenic-bearing slag” around its factory in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Gro Nystuen, a lawyer who evaluated companies for Norway’s pension fund, said the pollution was “harming the environment to such an extent that it also harmed the people living in the neighborhood.”
The next year, another Supreme Court committee accused the company of forcing 102 indigenous families from their homes in Odisha State, in eastern India, where it sought to mine bauxite for use in an aluminum refinery. According to the committee’s report, residents were “beaten up by the employees of M/s Vedanta.”
“An atmosphere of fear was created through the hired goons,” the report said. “After being forcibly removed they were kept under watch and ward by the armed guards of M/s Vedanta and no outsider was allowed to meet them. They were effectively being kept as prisoners.”
As Vedanta pursued its mining plan over several years, the plight of the indigenous tribe in Odisha became a focal point for international activist groups. The cause was taken up by Rahul Gandhi, the son of a former prime minister, as well as by Bollywood stars such as Gul Panag, who withdrew from a Vedanta marketing campaign.
The British commerce agency issued a rebuke of Vedanta’s actions in Odisha, and the Church of England’s investment funds sold their shares in the company in protest. “It was just very apparent that the lives of the villagers immediately around the refinery had been made worse, rather than better,” said Edward Mason, the chief of responsible investment for a $9 billion church fund. “The villagers had not been properly consulted about the process, or properly compensated.”
Vedanta’s operations elsewhere have drawn intense criticism. Its copper mine in Zambia has been a source of both pollution and suspicion of financial improprieties. In 2006, two years after Vedanta acquired the mine, the company dumped hazardous waste into the Kafue River, a major source of drinking water for the country, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of 2,000 residents. Fish were dying, according to the ruling in the case, and local residents experienced skin diseases, lung pain and diarrhea.
The company was fined by a local judge who wrote: “This was lack of corporate responsibility and criminal and a tipping point for corporate recklessness.”
Last year, Zambian officials began an audit based on suspicions that Vedanta was not paying the government its proper fees. Hundreds of former mine workers are fighting Vedanta for severance or disability pay. “This company is making its own rules in Zambia,” said Darious Yundayunda, a former miner who has been active with a group called Foil Vedanta. “People are struggling.”
Mr. Agarwal declined The Times’s interview requests over several months. But Vedanta has said publicly, “We remain fully committed to pursuing all our investments in a responsible manner, respecting the environment and human rights.”
Despite the complications and controversy, Mr. Agarwal’s fortune, according to Forbes, has grown from $1 billion to an estimated $3.5 billion since he purchased his condos at Time Warner.BIG SPENDERS
When Mr. Bloomberg set out the welcome mat for the world’s billionaires, the idea was this: Money they spent would trickle down to the doormen, concierges, cleaners, drivers and construction workers, as well as to the shopkeepers and restaurateurs who sell $5,000 handbags and $450 sushi dinners.
And many of the players at the Time Warner Center are indeed big spenders.
After Maxim Finskiy, a Russian business associate of the Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, moved in, he imported his Bentley.
Robert Tsao, who gave up his Taiwanese citizenship after authorities there sued him unsuccessfully for investing in mainland China, owns one of the world’s most renowned private collections of Asian art.
Adam Chen, who graduated from New York University in May, was one of several college students to use the complex as a dormitory. He celebrated his birthday last year at the restaurant Per Se in the Time Warner Center, dining on its famous starter, Oysters and Pearls, all captured in photographs on Instagram.
The precise impact of wealthy foreigners on the city may be more complex, though. As nonresidents, they pay no city income taxes and often receive hefty property tax breaks. A program aimed at new condo development doles out about a half-billion dollars in tax breaks a year, according to the city’s independent budget office. These savings are passed on to owners in the form of lower property taxes. The Time Warner Center was not part of the most lucrative tax break program, but many other buildings around Central Park have benefited.
The city’s first condo costing more than $100 million, which sold in the last few weeks at the new luxury tower One57, had property taxes this past year of $17,268, according to the city’s finance office. Those taxes will go up over time, but for now that is a savings of more than $359,000.
The Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit in New York, recently suggested a downside to the influx of billionaires who are in the city only sporadically.
“In terms of the local economy, you don’t have people who are going to plays, going to restaurants,” James Parrott, the institute’s chief economist, said. “They’re not spending at the dry cleaners, the grocers and all of that, so it deprives New York of all that local multiplier effect.”
What is more, Mr. Parrott said, the skyrocketing prices of the pieds-à-terre are affecting the price of real estate in the city more broadly. “There’s a downside to having such pressure at the top. It pulls up the prices overall. When owners of $10 million condos see that there’s a big market for $95 million condos, they’re more likely to raise their prices,” he said. “Then the person at $2 million raises his prices, then the person at $1 million sees that and there aren’t any prices below $1 million.”
Through a spokesman, Mr. Bloomberg said last month that he had hoped billionaires who moved to New York would not simply be part-timers but would live in the city and pay taxes “so we could use that revenue for government services that, incidentally, disproportionately benefit lower-income New Yorkers.”
Some local politicians have suggested taxing the owners of pieds-à-terre who are not city residents.
“We are spending money to keep them safe and maintaining the infrastructure,” said Brad Lander, a city councilman. “Should there be the equivalent of a commuter tax? An international residents tax?”
A proposal from the Fiscal Policy Institute would impose a graduated tax on pieds-à-terre worth $5 million or more. The group estimates it would generate $665 million a year in revenue for the city, mostly from owners of the approximately 445 apartments valued at more than $25 million.
PEELING BACK LAYERS
There is no simple way to unmask ownership of a shell company. Exploring each of the more than 200 shell companies that have owned units in the Time Warner Center became its own journey, with its own surprise ending.
The case of Columbus Skyline, which paid $25.6 million for three condos, began with two clues: a barely legible signature and a forwarding address.
The signature on the deeds was difficult to read, but in one spot it could be made out: Wang Zi. A search of that name did not yield obvious results, but a Wang Zi did register a phone number at Time Warner. The Times cross-referenced that number and found it was tied to a firm called MQ Realty with an address at an apartment in a public housing complex in Chinatown. A visit to that apartment yielded little more than a conversation in Chinese with a neighbor who said the person behind MQ Realty had recently moved. It was a dead end.
The second clue proved more promising. Columbus Skyline was formed in New York State. While the state filing does not list the name of the L.L.C.’s owner, it does have an address: 10 East 39th St., Suite 1110. In public records, one name comes up as having used that address: Wang Wenliang.
Further searches turned up a prominent Wang Wenliang. This Mr. Wang is a former municipal official in Dandong, a city on China’s border with North Korea, and a member of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliamentary body. Among his businesses is a construction empire that has worked on numerous consulates and embassies for the Chinese government, and he is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He is on the board of trustees of N.Y.U., where he donated $25 million.
But establishing that Mr. Wang from Dandong was the owner of the Time Warner condos required more confirmation.
The lawyer listed on the condo sales was David Glassman. A search of commercial property filings showed that Mr. Glassman had also done legal work for an affiliate of Mr. Wang’s company, China Rilin Construction Group.
When The Times called Mr. Glassman, he briefly discussed the condos and said he would ask Mr. Wang if he would be interviewed about his ownership.
Another round of searches found a less glamorous side to real estate used by Mr. Wang’s company in the United States. In February 2011, the housing task force in Jersey City followed up on a complaint from a resident on Pavonia Avenue about the number of people living in a single-family residence rented by Rilin. “We conducted the inspection and uncovered conditions that were very troubling to say the least,” wrote Mark Redfield, the task force chairman.
“There were 15 Asian males with no identification, passports, or work visas all residing in this one-family attached rowhouse,” an internal email from Mr. Redfield said. “The house was divided up into sleeping quarters to accommodate 28 roomers,” he wrote, adding, “The crammed quarters were extremely unsanitary and posed an imminent hazard.”
The same day, Jersey City officials found “the same conditions” at another house that was used by Rilin for its workers, according to city records.
In 2013, Jersey City inspectors reported finding an illegal rooming house at another location used by Rilin. An internal city email said the building was “housing Chinese workers who work for the Chinese Embassy as construction workers. This is the same group China Rilin Construction Corp. that the task force issued summonses to in 2011 for housing multiple Chinese workers.”
Rilin paid fines of several thousand dollars for the 2011 violations. The outcome of the 2013 case was unclear from city records, but the company said it had been dismissed.
Mr. Wang’s lawyer said Rilin “took the allegations very seriously, and the reported violations were all quickly remedied by the company or dismissed.” He disputed the idea that 28 people lived at the Pavonia Avenue house, saying the top bunks had been used for storage. He said the Wang family had purchased the Time Warner condos through a shell company partly because a disgruntled former employee had threatened to harm them.Continue reading the main story
When The Times asked Ms. Sample, the Time Warner real estate agent who represented Mr. Wang, for information about his condo purchases, she shot back: “How do you know about him?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreign-wealth-flows-to-time-warner-condos.html

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Clinton donors also pumped millions into McAuliffe’s coffers

Jul 29, 2015 | The Washington Post

By Laura Vozzella

RICHMOND — Wang Wenliang is a delegate to China’s parliament whose construction conglomerate builds China’s embassies around the world and controls a strategic port near North Korea.
He also is a big donor — seven figures to the Clinton Foundation and, through his firm’s New Jersey affiliate, six figures to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
More than 175 contributors to the Clinton Foundation and to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 Democratic presidential campaign have dug deep into their wallets for McAuliffe (D), often giving prolifically despite little or no connection to Virginia.
Wang’s companies ship soybeans through Virginia ports, but the tie to the commonwealth is more tenuous for many of the dual donors. Among them is an Omaha database executive who lavished so much corporate jet travel on himself and the Clinton family that shareholders forced him out. A Hollywood media mogul with a singular interest in Israel. And an Argentine-born energy tycoon who recalled visiting Richmond just once — flying in and out years ago with Bill Clinton, his Georgetown classmate.
Of the $60 million McAuliffe has raised for his two gubernatorial bids, inauguration, political action committee and the Democratic Party of Virginia, nearly $18 million has come from contributors to the Clinton Foundation or to Hillary Clinton’s current campaign.
That share represents nearly one third of the money McAuliffe has pulled in from his largest donors, according to a Washington Post analysis of Virginia political donations of at least $15,000. It comes on top of the $1 million that Hillary Clinton drummed up in June by headlining a dinner for the state party, which began the quarter with less than $16,000 in the bank.
The substantial overlap highlights how intimately McAuliffe’s political universe is intertwined with that of former president Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, for whom McAuliffe has been a record-smashing fundraiser and a dear friend. The phenomenon, which continues to play out even now, 18 months into the term-limited governor’s tenure, represents something more complicated than a man with a most-favored “Friend of Bill” status riding on the Clintons’ coattails.
McAuliffe spent much of his adult life cultivating the vast donor network that supported Bill Clinton through two winning presidential bids and Hillary Clinton through her first, which she lost. To see him as merely feeding off that is a bit like confusing the engine with the caboose.
McAuliffe has previously found ways to tap into the Clinton network, with a string of sometimes controversial business ventures that made him a multimillionaire. He turned to the Clinton crowd for much of the money he needed to win office. He continues to do so, not only for political cash but to get the state help from Washington and to get a foot in the door with overseas economic development prospects.
[McAuliffe has a history of mixing business, politics]
The symbiotic Clinton-McAuliffe relationship could come full circle next year if McAuliffe, succeeding as governor at least in part because of Clinton connections, can use his popularity to help deliver Virginia to Hillary Clinton.
A spokesman for the governor declined to comment on the overlap. McAuliffe has said many times that he ran for governor to help Virginians, not Hillary Clinton.
“It should come as no surprise that Governor McAuliffe raises money from a network that he helped build in order to elect leaders who have spent their entire lives fighting for economic opportunity for all Americans,” said Brian Zuzenak, political director at McAuliffe’s Common Good VA PAC.
Said Clinton campaign spokesman Christina Reynolds: “It shouldn’t come as a surprise that people who support philanthropic work, including the Clinton Foundation’s programs, also think Hillary Clinton would be a great president or decided to support Terry McAuliffe for governor.”
Donors say much the same. Some of the Clinton backers who have given to McAuliffe have known him for decades, consider him a friend and find his fundraising pitches irresistible.
“He’s such a force of nature that serves whoever he’s working with extraordinarily well,” said one major donor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be frank.
“He makes people want to do things,” the donor said. “It’s not something you can learn and it’s not something you can derive from somebody else. It’s a talent. . . . Obviously, the Clinton relationship and legacy is a very big part of his identity. But also, Terry’s his own man.”Clinton controversies old and new
Even so, the extent to which McAuliffe relies on the Clinton circle complicates his efforts to distinguish his governorship from his often flamboyant work as their chief money man.
The former Democratic National Committee chairman and chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign has been highly sensitive to any suggestion that the Clintons figure into his political calculus as he leads a state that is home to more than 8 million people. Yet nearly half of Hillary Clinton’s top bundlers — 60 of the 123 “Hillblazers” who have each raised $100,000 since her campaign began in April — have given to McAuliffe in Virginia.
More than a few evoke old Clinton controversies, some of which involved McAuliffe. Populating the governor’s donor rolls are Clinton Foundation contributors who slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, attended White House coffee gatherings, resigned over the Whitewater controversy and, perhaps most notoriously, pushed for a financier friend’s pardon.
Other donors may feed the perception that individuals and businesses with foreign connections have made donations — whether to the Clinton Foundation or to McAuliffe committees — as a way to ingratiate themselves to Hillary Clinton as she seeks the presidency.
Virginia’s loose campaign-finance laws do not limit the size of personal, corporate or union donations.
Some of the individuals and companies giving to the foundation and McAuliffe have enormous federal contracting interests and specific foreign policy agendas that Hillary Clinton would be in a position to advance as president. They include: an executive with a Dubai-based U.S. military contractor who was accused of overbilling the government and illegally shipping supplies to American troops through Iran, and a Palestinian-born businessman who feted former leader Yasser Arafat in Washington.
“I think the people who have common values have a tendency to work together on lots of different projects,” said New York venture capitalist Jay T. Snyder, a major Clinton bundler, foundation giver and McAuliffe donor whose father met McAuliffe through now-retired congressman Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.). “Don’t we all use the relations we all have from over the years? . . . When we had an opportunity to help him and his vision for the commonwealth, we were thrilled to be able to do it.”
Several major donors to both McAuliffe and the Clinton Foundation said that having McAuliffe at the helm in Richmond could help Hillary Clinton win Virginia in 2016. But they also said that was not why they had donated to McAuliffe. Some helped fund his unsuccessful gubernatorial in 2009, when Hillary Clinton was many years away from making her second run for the presidency.
“My contributions to him predate Hillary’s desire to be president by a long shot,” said Rolando Gonzalez-Bunster, founder of InterEnergy Holdings, who sits on the Clinton Foundation’s board and donated $30,000 to McAuliffe’s 2009 and 2013 campaigns. “I have not in any way used Terry as a way to help Hillary.”
He and other dual donors attributed the overlap to the loyalty and warm friendship between the Clintons, McAuliffe and their common circle of supporters.
“If Terry was running for dog-catcher someplace in Wyoming, I would have given him the same amount of money,” said a six-figure contributor to both McAuliffe and the foundation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “I love him as family. Same with the Clintons. People who join their team and get to know them — no one leaves.”Intense foreign policy interests
American-Israeli media mogul Haim Saban, who made his fortune with the “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers,” has described his political interests as extremely narrow.
“I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel,” Saban, who founded the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, told the New York Times in 2004.
Yet he opened his checkbook and Beverly Hills mansion for a guy in a governor’s race clear across the country.
Saban donated a total of $573,000 to McAuliffe’s two campaigns and held a $15,000 per-plate lunch fundraiser for him at his home in 2013. The headliner was Hillary Clinton, whose family foundation received at least $10 million from Saban.
Saban, who did not respond to messages seeking comment, has long been a prolific Democratic fundraiser. But the commonwealth was new territory for him. Except for McAuliffe, Saban has never given to a Virginia candidate, according to records compiled by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project.
The same can be said of West Legend Co., the New Jersey affiliate of Rilin Enterprises, a Chinese firm led by Wang. West Legend gave a total of $120,000 to McAuliffe’s 2013 campaign and inauguration.
Wang’s $2 million pledge to the foundation drew attention this year, first from CBS News and then other outlets, because of his connections to the Chinese government — both as a member of the National People’s Congress and as a contractor entrusted to build China’s embassies.
“We admire and applaud Governor McAuliffe for his leadership in promoting trade, economic growth, and job creation,” said a statement issued by West Legend, which added that company officials were unavailable to comment.
Another new-to-Virginia donor is Vin Gupta of Omaha, whose largess to the Clintons got him a stay in the Lincoln Bedroom and a nomination to be ambassador to Fiji. But it also brought trouble. He was so generous with his corporate jets — letting the Clinton family fly to Switzerland, Hawaii and other locales — that shareholders forced him out of the database company he founded. He also had signed Bill Clinton to a $3.3 million consulting contract.
Under Senate ethics rules, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) was required to reimburse the company only for her travel, based on the cost of a first-class ticket, which she said she did. Gupta did not respond to messages left with a staff member at his home.
One Virginian of note is A. Huda Farouki. The longtime Clinton supporter celebrated New Year’s Eve 1999with the first couple and was invited to a state dinner. He is chairman of Anham LLC, a Dubai-based conglomerate hired by the Pentagon to supply U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A 2011 government audit found that Anham overbilled the Pentagon $4.4 million, Bloomberg Business reported at the time. The company also brought supplies to Afghanistan through Iran, possibly violating U.S. sanctions, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2013. Farouki and the company did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Donor Beth Dozoretz pressed Bill Clinton to pardon fugitive billionaire Marc Rich in the waning days of his term. Roger Altman resigned as Clinton’s deputy Treasury secretary over the Whitewater scandal.
Some of celebrities and high-fliers who have given to McAuliffe have made relatively small donations that look like token gestures, given their vast wealth. Movie director Steven Spielberg and singer Barbra Streisand each gave $5,000. Northern Virginia technology entrepreneur Frank Islam, who at one time stocked koi fish worth $30,000 in the ponds at his mansion in Potomac, Md., gave a McAuliffe committee $2,500.
Others gave to McAuliffe in eye-popping sums: $1.25 million from founding Facebook president Sean Parker; $515,000 from Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson and his company; $476,000 from Chicago venture capitalist J.B. Pritzker; $453,421 from Chicago securities trader Raj Fernando.
The sums are all the more striking when donors have scant interest in Virginia, as is the case with Gonzalez-Bunster, the Latin American energy baron. Gonzalez-Bunster — who was born in Argentina, educated at Georgetown and lives in Greenwich, Conn. — said he does no business in Virginia and never cared about commonwealth politics until his friend ran for governor. He pays little attention even now.
“I’m not that cognizant of what goes on in Virginia,” he said.
But he is under the general impression that things are going well for McAuliffe.
“I get a daily or weekly report from somebody,” he added, referring to a roundup of McAuliffe administration happenings regularly e-mailed to donors. “I read it occasionally.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/scores-of-clinton-donors-pumped-millions-into-mcauliffe-coffers/2015/07/29/d6396064-1e99-11e5-84d5-eb37ee8eaa61_story.html

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Real estate needs further regulation

Feb 10, 2015 | Washington Square News

By WSN Editorial Board

New York City is one of the wealthiestcities in the world, and as a result has one of the fiercest luxury real estate markets. A New York Times investigativereport released Feb. 7 delved into this high-end market and found that a huge number of residences are owned by secretive, anonymous shell companies that allow foreign buyers — some of them criminals — to purchase condos. The regulatory loophole that has brought this infusion of foreign assets provides a safe haven for both dirty and clean money, and makes the real estate market not only less transparent, but also more competitive.
New York City’s elite real estate is being bought up at a staggering rate by anonymous shell companies. Due to the lack of legal imperative to investigate the identities of buyers, large numbers of unscrupulous ultra-rich have come to own a large percentage of New York’s most valuable real estate. In 2010, a $15.65 million condominium in the Time Warner Center was bought by Vitaly Malkin, a Russian banker and politician who has been linked to organized crime and subsequently banned from entering Canada. Similarly, Dimitrios Contominas, a Greek businessman arrested for corruption charges last year, purchased a $21.4 million unit on the 74th floor, the same floor as Malkin. The shell companies that owners use are often registered in the names of family, friends and consultants instead of the owners themselves, and their ownership can be changed without documentation. Even Tom Brady has been linked to buying real estate using these dubious methods.
The shell company Columbus Skyline, which bought three condos for a total of $25.6 million, was traced to NYU Board of Trustees member Wang Wenliang. In 2010, Wang donated $25 million to the university and founded the NYU Center on U.S.-ChinaRelations. Wang’s company, China Rilin Construction Group, was fined thousands of dollars for housing workers in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions in New Jersey. A second, similar case was dismissed. According to the NYU Board of Trustees page, trustee members are “keepers of the mission of NYU” who “must pay particularly close attention to the mission of obligations to society that are unique to the academic enterprise.” Wang’s questionable transactions show that he has failed to meet these standards.
It is clear that further regulation is needed for these shell companies that all too easily buy up real estate with untraceable funds. New York City’s expanding skyline may already be a symbol of wealth inequality, but it is still worsened by this influx of suspicious foreign funds. This is not just a matter of political integrity, but a real concern for the stability of the already skyrocketing real estate market. Seemingly boundless money flowing into the U.S. economy and universities seems nice, but it cannot be an excuse to ignore global political realities.
http://www.nyunews.com/2015/02/10/real-estate-needs-further-recognition/

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"McAuliffe Campaign" Coverage

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe under federal investigation for campaign contributions

May 24, 2016 | CNN

By Evan Perez, Shimon Prokupecz and Pamela Brown

Washington (CNN)Virginia Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the FBI and prosecutors from the Justice Department's public integrity unit, U.S. officials briefed on the probe say.
The investigation dates to at least last year and has focused, at least in part, on whether donations to his gubernatorial campaign violated the law, the officials said.
McAuliffe wasn't notified by investigators that he is a target of the probe, according to the officials."The Governor will certainly cooperate with the government if he is contacted about it," said Marc Elias, attorney for McAuliffe campaign, in a statement to CNN.
As part of the probe, the officials said, investigators have scrutinized McAuliffe's time as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative, a vehicle of the charitable foundation set up by former President Bill Clinton.
here's no allegation that the foundation did anything improper; the probe has focused on McAuliffe and the electoral campaign donations, the officials said.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the FBI declined to comment.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, McAuliffe said he was "shocked" by the investigation and that it "has nothing to do with the Clinton Foundation."
"This was an allegation of a gentleman who gave a check to my campaign," McAuliffe said. "I didn't bring the donor in. I didn't bring him into the Clinton foundation. I'm not sure if I've even met the person, to be honest with you."
Among the McAuliffe donations that drew the interest of the investigators was $120,000 from a Chinese businessman, Wang Wenliang, through his U.S. businesses. Wang was previously delegate to China's National People's Congress, the country's ceremonial legislature.
"Neither the Governor nor his former campaign has knowledge of this matter, but as reported, contributions to the campaign from Mr. Wang were completely lawful," Elias said.
Wang also has been a donor to the Clinton foundation, pledging $2 million. He also has been a prolific donor to other causes, including to New York University, Harvard and environmental issues in Florida.
U.S. election law prohibits foreign nationals from donating to federal, state or local elections. Penalties for violations include fines and/or imprisonment.
But Wang holds U.S. permanent resident status, according to a spokeswoman, which would make him a U.S. person under election law and eligible to donate to McAuliffe's campaign.
Neither Wang nor his company used to make the donations have been contacted by U.S. investigators, according to the spokeswoman.
McAuliffe is the second consecutive Virginia governor to be investigated by Justice Department and the FBI. In 2014, Bob McDonnell was convicted of corruption charges related to $175,000 in loans and gifts he received from a donor and friend. The Supreme Court is weighing an appeal of the conviction.
It couldn't be learned what else the FBI and Justice Department are investigating as part of the probe in McAuliffe.
The officials say the investigation remains active and ongoing.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/23/politics/terry-mcauliffe-fbi-doj-federal-investigation-campaign-contributions/

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Inquiry Highlights Terry McAuliffe’s Ties to Chinese Company

May 24, 2016 | The New York Times

By Nicholas Confessore and Stephanie Saul

Four years ago, one of China’s largest agricultural importers sent representatives to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., hoping that meetings with elite party officials might yield business opportunities. The company, the Dandong Port Group, was particularly focused on the governors in attendance, according to an interview with Dandong’s general counsel broadcast by Chinese state television.
“If you really want to influence, let’s say, U.S.-China policy,” he said, “it’s almost worth it to have emphasis and influence on the state level.”
The meetings, arranged by a former South Carolina governor, marked a period of expansion in the United States for Dandong and its affiliated companies, involving negotiations with officials in Washington, Arkansas, South Carolina and Virginia. But now, the company’s widening influence is coming under scrutiny by federal prosecutors, who are examining the relationship between Dandong’s wealthy and connected chairman, Wang Wenliang, and Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, a Democrat who was elected in 2013.
A federal law enforcement official said the inquiry included $120,000 in contributions that a New Jersey construction firm controlled by Mr. Wang made to Mr. McAuliffe’s 2013 campaign and inaugural committee. That official and a second law enforcement official, both of whom asked for anonymity to discuss the matter, said it was a preliminary inquiry of Mr. McAuliffe’s campaign donations, and they provided no detail about the nature and scope of any potential violations being scrutinized.
Though Mr. Wang is a Chinese citizen, he is also a legal permanent resident of the United States, according to a spokeswoman for him, which entitles him to make campaign contributions.
The inquiry was first reported on Monday by CNN, which said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department’s public integrity unit were involved in the review. The inquiry also encompasses Mr. McAuliffe’s role as a board member of the Clinton Foundation, to which another company linked to Mr. Wang pledged a $2 million contribution in 2013. The foundation has raised millions of dollars from companies and wealthy individuals overseas as well as from foreign governments.
Representatives for Mr. McAuliffe and Mr. Wang said they had not been contacted by the Justice Department or the F.B.I. A spokesman for the Clinton Foundation also said it had not been contacted by law enforcement officials.
Speaking to reporters in Virginia on Tuesday, Mr. McAuliffe said he was shocked by reports of an inquiry. He had played no role in soliciting Mr. Wang’s pledge to the Clinton Foundation and said the contributions to his campaign from by Mr. Wang’s company were legitimate.
“I’m very confident this gentleman had been fully vetted,” Mr. McAuliffe said of Mr. Wang.
But the federal inquiry throws a cloud over Mr. McAuliffe at a critical time: He is a top fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton, a close confidant of her and her husband, and the governor of a swing state critical to her chances of becoming president. On Sunday, Mr. McAuliffe headlined a $5,000-a-head Virginia fund-raising event for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Mr. McAuliffe and Mr. Wang are, in a sense, mirror images: wealthy self-made men with intertwined careers in business and politics. Before becoming governor, Mr. McAuliffe was an inveterate deal-maker involved in everything from real estate to banking to electric cars. Last year, a separate federal review found that Mr. McAuliffe had lobbied officials at the Department of Homeland Security to speed visas for Chinese investors in an electric car company.
The review said department officials had created a perception of “special consideration” for Mr. McAuliffe and other prominent Democrats, but found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Mr. Wang is a delegate to China’s legislative house, the National People’s Congress. His companies run ports, import agricultural products and construct Chinese embassies around the world. His extensive business empire is based in Dandong, a port city that borders North Korea.
After starting his career as a municipal adviser to the Dandong government on planning and economics issues, he amassed a fortune, partly by securing construction contracts to work on Chinese embassies and consular offices around the globe, including the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
From 2012 to the end of last year, according to federal records, Mr. Wang’s companies paid $1.5 million to McGuireWoods Consulting to lobby on trade and visa issues. Dandong’s lobbyists included Jim Hodges, the former South Carolina governor. In 2012, Mr. Hodges arranged meetings with governors for Mark T. Fung, who was Dandong’s general counsel.
Mr. Wang also met with Mr. McAuliffe before he ran for governor, at a 2012 dinner hosted by Mr. Hodges. Mr. McAuliffe was an American businessman investing in China; Mr. Wang was a Chinese executive whose firms did business in Virginia. The next year, when Mr. McAuliffe ran for governor, one of Mr. Wang’s companies, West Legend, contributed to his campaign. (Corporate contributions are permitted in Virginia.)
But records and interviews reveal that Mr. Wang’s companies have had numerous reasons to seek the favor of United States government officials. Among Mr. Wang’s ventures are importing and crushing soybeans. In late 2012, his company entered negotiations to buy a privately owned port on the Mississippi River in Arkansas. The negotiations led to a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which includes representatives of the departments of State, Commerce and Homeland Security.
A letter from Rilin, one of Mr. Wang’s companies, to the American Embassy in Beijing, obtained by The New York Times, says that company representatives met with then-Gov. Mike Beebe of Arkansas while negotiating that deal, which was worth $27 million. Reached on Tuesday, Mr. Beebe said he did not remember ever having met with the company.
The foreign investment committee approved the deal in April 2013, but it ultimately fell through. Mr. Wang’s company complained that a delegation of Chinese nationals the company wanted to review the port had been denied visas.
About that same time, McGuireWoods contacted the American Embassy to discuss “visa issues.”
Later that year, Gary Locke, then the United States’ ambassador to China, and the United States consul general in Shenyang met with Rilin in Dandong, according to a news release issued by the Dandong Port, which said the company had obtained a “group visa” making it more convenient for employees to travel to the United States “for business and education purposes.”
Reached on Tuesday, Mr. Locke, who is a lawyer in Seattle, said that he remembered visiting Dandong, but added that there was no such thing as a group visa for a company.
Mr. Wang’s agricultural business also extended to Virginia. In 2011, Gov. Bob McDonnell announced that Perdue Agribusiness had agreed with Mr. Wang’s company to export soybeans through Perdue’s port in Chesapeake, Va.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mr. Wang said: “West Legend does business in Virginia and supports Gov. McAuliffe’s jobs-creation agenda. Its political contributions comply with all federal and state laws.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/25/us/politics/terry-mcauliffe-wang-wenliang.html

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Virginia's Governor — a Longtime Hillary Clinton Ally — Is Under Federal Investigation

May 24, 2016 | Vice News

By Sarah Mimms

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a close ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton, is reportedly under investigation by the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) over campaign contributions he received from a Chinese businessman.
The inquiry is based, at least in part, on donations that McAuliffe received during his 2013 gubernatorial campaign, according to CNN, which broke the news of the investigation on Monday. Investigators are said to be scrutinizing a $120,000 donation from Chinese businessman Wang Wenliang, among other campaign contributions. Wenliang has permanent residency status in the US, a spokesperson told CNN.
The FBI has also examined McAuliffe's role on the board of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), a charitable foundation that Bill Clinton started after he exited the White House in 2000. The Clintons are longtime friends of the governor, and they both backed him during his 2013 campaign. Wenliang has also donated to CGI, but CNN quoted US officials briefed on the investigation as saying they have found no evidence of wrongdoing by the foundation.
McAuliffe's attorney Marc Elias told CNN that the governor had not been notified that he is at the center of a federal investigation. The attorney said the governor "will certainly cooperate with the government if he is contacted about it."
McAuliffe is a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and he worked previously on presidential campaigns for both Clintons. The governor is also involved in Hillary Clinton's 2016 White House bid, and he campaigned for her earlier this year in his home state of Virginia, which will be a major swing state in the general election in November.
Formerly a national Democratic operative and fundraiser, McAuliffe is no stranger to federal investigations. He won the 2013 gubernatorial election despite facing heavy criticism from his opponents over probes by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Homeland Security into GreenTech Automotive, an electric car company McAuliffe he founded and left before entering the race.
The feds were investigating whether the company used McAuliffe's political ties to get preferential treatment when seeking visas for Chinese investors. Anthony Rodham, Hillary Clinton's brother, was also caught up in the investigation for his work recruiting Chinese investors for the company.
The future governor denied any wrongdoing, and neither he nor Rodham were ever charged in connection with the case. McAuliffe said at the time that he had simply fought for visas that were inexplicably delayed by bureaucracy, much as he planned to fight for Virginia's interests as governor. The explanation speaks to a personality that has helped him to build a long political career in both Virginia and nationally, where he is known as a brash but energetic and powerful fundraiser who can come across as tone-deaf.
In his 2008 book, What a Party!, which become another focus of the 2013 campaign against him, McAuliffe gleefully described his close relationship with the Clintons and celebrity Democratic donors, as well as his endless fundraising, which often trumped everything else in his life. In one section, often cited by Republicans during his campaign, McAuliffe described leaving his crying wife and newborn baby in the back of a car with a stunned assistant on the way home from the hospital, in order to stop in at a Democratic fundraiser.
"It was a million bucks for the Democratic Party," he reasoned in the book, adding that all was forgiven once they got home.
McAuliffe is now the second Virginia governor in a row to come under federal scrutiny for potential campaign finance violations. Former Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife were indicted just 10 days after leaving office over gifts the couple accepted from a Virginia drug company CEO who did business with the state. McDonnell is currently appealing the case in the Supreme Court, and during oral arguments earlier this year the justices reportedlysounded sympathetic to his assertion that those sorts of gifts are a routine part of US politics. He faces two years in prison.
https://news.vice.com/article/virginia-governor-terry-mcauliffe-hillary-clinton-federal-investigation

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Authorities investigate whether Terry McAuliffe violated lobbying restrictions

May 27, 2016 | The Economist

TERRY MCAULIFFE—a long-term ally of Hillary Clinton—was elected governor of Virginia in 2013 because, as a Democrat, he represented a clean break from the corruption scandal that brought his Republican predecessor, Bob McDonnell, low. Indeed, Mr McAuliffe made ethics reform a major theme of his administration. But only three years later, Mr McAuliffe has found himself under investigation by the Department of Justice.
Virginia, which produced many of the early icons of American representative government, is usually known for upright politics; for two consecutive governors to be tarnished in this way is unfortunate. Mr McDonnell was convicted in 2014 of selling his office, but is appealing to the Supreme Court. The McAuliffe controversy, though it should not be compared to Mr McDonnell’s case, may be important for different reasons. Mr McAuliffe is a major fundraiser for Mrs Clinton, and he governs a swing state that is critical to her chances in November. While Mrs Clinton’s nomination in July may be assured, she still faces many challenges, foremost among them federal scrutiny of her use of a private email server as secretary of state. Now Mrs Clinton may have to defend one of her closest friends.
Initial reports suggested that the FBI was looking into $120,000 in contributions to Mr McAuliffe’s campaign and inaugural committees from a wealthy Chinese businessman, Wang Wenliang. The FBI also was said to be examining Mr McAuliffe’s activities as an overseer of the Clinton Foundation, to which Mr Wang donated $2 million in 2013. But one of Mr McAuliffe’s lawyers says the Department of Justice has told him it isn’t interested in the contributions. Rather, it is trying to determine whether Mr McAuliffe may have violated restrictions on lobbying for foreign governments. However, Mr McAuliffe said that his lawyer, after talking to the Justice Department, has told him the government has seen no sign he did anything illegal.
James Cooper of Arnold & Porter, a Washington law firm, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch on May 25th that the Justice Department is looking into foreign sources of income for McAuliffe before he took office in January 2014 and whether he lobbied for overseas interests without registering as a foreign agent. There was no immediate comment from the department.
Though Mr Wang is a Chinese citizen, he is a legal permanent resident of the United States, allowing him to make donations to American politicians. He also is a Chinese legislator, sitting in the National People’s Congress. He has business interests in Virginia, some of which predate Mr McAuliffe’s term, including a soybean-export deal in 2011 announced by Mr McDonnell.
Mr McAuliffe said he was shocked by the federal investigation and suggested he was a victim of deliberate, embarrassing leaks to the press. Mr McAuliffe also defended Mr Wang, alluding to his philanthropy. Mr McAuliffe could not say with certainty that he’d even met Mr Wang, conceding later they’d briefly met twice, perhaps over coffee for about 10 minutes.
The investigation is a distraction Mr McAuliffe doesn’t need. The most recent public polling, by Roanoke College, suggests that Mrs Clinton and Donald Trump are tied in Virginia, which tends to be friendlier to Democrats in higher turnout state-wide elections.
Questions about the fortune Mr McAuliffe amassed at the intersection of politics and business have repeatedly cropped up during his public life. In his first unsuccessful run for governor in 2009, Mr McAuliffe had to explain several eyebrow-raising investments. They included a deal for shares in a telecoms firm, Global Crossing, that he sold at peak value before the company collapsed, erasing thousands of jobs.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2016/05/clouds-over-virginia

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EXCLUSIVE: Video footage showing Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe and Chinese billionaire Wang Wenliang at Hillary's house revealed as FBI probes campaign donations

May 26, 2016 | Daily Mail

By Geoff Earle

· Footage shows McAuliffe and Wang entering Clinton's home separately for 2013 fundraiser
· Both men spent more than an hour there and left the event after dark
· McAuliffe said this week he wouldn't know Wang 'if he sat in the chair next to me.'
· The two men shook hands at the event, a source told Time Magazine this week
· CNN reported Monday that federal investigators were probing $120,000 in contributions a subsidiary of Wang's company made to McAuliffe's campaign
· McAuliffe's lawyer says there is no evidence of wrongdoing and the feds were focused on statues governing lobbying on behalf of foreign governments – not campaign fundraising
· The governor blasted the 'leak' of information about the investigation
· Wang pledged $2 million to the Clinton Foundation and is believed to have close ties to the Chinese government
· McAuliffe is a longtime friend Bill and Hillary Clinton's, chaired fundraising for her failed 2008 campaign and run the DNC

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe may not recall ever having met Chinese billionaire businessman Wang Wenliang, but he certainly spent some time inside the same well-appointed home – as exclusive footage obtained by Daily Mail Online reveals.
Both men can be seen walking up to the front door of Hillary Clinton's home off D.C.'s Embassy Row on September 30, 2013, according to video footage obtained by a 'tracker' who was filming guests who attended the event.
Both men also appeared in a CNN report Monday that the FBI and the Department of Justice were investigating McAuliffe's campaign finances, including $120,000 in campaign contributions linked to Wang.

The footage, obtained by anti-Hillary opposition research group America Rising, shows the two men arriving separately to attend the big bucks fundraiser.
Wang can be seen walking up the sidewalk toward Hillary's home, accompanied by an entourage. McAuliffe can be seen getting out of a black SUV and walking into the funder.
A couple hours after arriving, the men left separately after dark and were escorted back into their vehicles.
Time magazine reported this week that McAuliffe had invited Wang to the fundraiser, and a Wang representative told the publication that the two men shook hands at the event.
McAuliffe this week blasted federal officials for leaking the apparent investigation.
'I was somewhat shocked when this got leaked, he said in a Wednesday radio interview. 'It is very unfortunate that our institutions of integrity like the Justice and the FBI would leak information. They should be held to a higher standard.
Earlier, he disputed whether he even had met Wang, who obtained a position in the Chinese People's Congress and whose firm got contracts to constructive the Chinese embassy in D.C.
Rilin Enterprises, the firm Wang runs, made a $2 million contribution to the endowment of the Clinton Foundation in 2013 to aid the foundation's charity efforts.

'This has nothing to do with the Clinton Foundation,' McAuliffe said this week.
'This was an allegation of a gentleman who gave a check to my campaign,' McAuliffe added. 'I didn't bring the donor in. I didn't bring him into the Clinton foundation. I'm not sure if I've ever met the person, to be honest with you. I know the folks who worked in his company. It had nothing to do with he Clinton Foundation.'
Later, McAuliffe said his staff had informed him that several meetings with Wang, a legal resident, had likely occurred.
'I did no deals,' McAuliffe said Wednesday. I would not know the man if he sat in the chair next to me.'
Wang gave $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation within weeks of the fundraiser in D.C.
McAuliffe, who previously ran the Democratic National Committee and headed fundraising for Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, has hired James W. Cooper, a partner at the law firm Arnold & Porter, to represent him in the matter.
Cooper told The Washington Post that federal investigators 'for whatever reason' got interested in McAuliffe's foreign sources of income from the time before he got elected governor in early November of 2013.
'All of this income is from the governor's time as a private citizen and businessman who did deals that were well publicized around the world. So the fact that he had foreign income was not remarkable,' Cooper told the paper.

Federal statutes require agents of foreign governments disclose any work they do to try to influence U.S. government policy.
Cooper's well-established firm lists his expertise as being white collar defense, crisis management, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and other complex litigation. He is a former Justice Department attorney.
He told the Post federal officials hadn't mentioned anything to him about the Clinton Foundation or Wang.
'I don't know if there was ever an investigation about Mr. Wang's lawful contribution,' he said. 'They have not mentioned anything about corruption in office. They have not mentioned anything about campaign finance.'
The investigation has already taken a toll on McAuliffe's prolific fundraising. On Thursday he pulled out from June fundraiser for former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, a top Democratic Senate candidate.
'I told him I didn't want any distractions for him. He's got a critical Senate race,' McAuliffe told reporters.
The original CNN report cited anonymous sources who said investigators are looking at McAuliffe's campaign financing, including a $120,000 contribution from companies affiliated with Chinese Wang.
According to a 2015 Washington Post report, West Legend Co., a New Jersey affiliate of Rilin Enterprises, gave contributions to McAuliffe's election campaign and inauguration totaling $120,000.
Rilin has spent heavily on lobbying, and also owns a strategic port along the border with North Korea, in addition to constructing embassies around the world.
Forbes has put Wang's net work at just over $1 billion. China expert Jim Mann told CBS in 2013 that the embassy contract pointed to close government ties, since a top priority in embassy work is attention to national security.
In 'embassy construction, one of the most important tasks is making sure that there are no bugs there,' he said at the time. 'So you want to have the closest security and intelligence connections with and approval of the person or company that's going to build your embassy.'

Wang also served as a municipal official in Dandong province in China.
The U.S. Justice Department has declined comment 'as a matter of policy.'
The Dandong Port Company disclosed lobbying fees of $120,000 during the first three months of 2013. Agencies that got lobbied included the State Department, for 'Selected Visas for visitors to U.S.,' according to Senate lobbying records.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3611326/Video-footage-showing-Virginia-Governor-Terry-McAuliffe-Chinese-billionaire-Wang-Wenliang-Hillary-s-house-revealed-FBI-probes-campaign-donations.html

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Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe Invited Chinese Donor to Hillary Clinton’s Home

May 25, 2016 | Time

By Michael Scherer

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe invited the Chinese businessman whose donations to him have been named as a focus of Justice Department investigators to a 2013 fundraiser at Hillary Clinton’s personal Washington, D.C., residence.
Wang Wenliang, a Chinese national with U.S. permanent residency, briefly shook Clinton’s hand at the Sept. 30 event, a representative for Wang told TIME. An American company controlled by Wang made a $60,000 contribution to McAuliffe’s campaign three weeks before the fundraiser. Less than a month later, a separate Wang company pledged $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation, the first of several donations that eventually totaled $2 million.
The fundraiser was one of at least three interactions between Wang and McAuliffe, according to the businessman’s representative. McAuliffe initially told reporters this week he could not remember ever meeting Wang, though he later clarified that his staff had informed him of several likely meetings. “I did no deals,” McAuliffe said Wednesday in a radio interview. “I would not know the man if he sat in the chair next to me.”
The relationship between McAuliffe and Wang has been under scrutiny since CNN reported that the FBI and Justice Department’s public integrity division were investigating McAuliffe. Among the donations that were of interest to investigators, according to CNN, were a total of $120,000 in contributions to McAuliffe from a company controlled by Wang. Foreigners with permanent residency in the U.S. are allowed to make donations to campaigns under U.S. election laws, and corporations are allowed to make direct donations in Virginia.
James W. Cooper, an attorney at Arnold and Porter who has been hired by McAuliffe, told reporters Wednesday that Justice Department officials had told him the focus of investigation was not the Wang donations, but questions over foreign sources of personal income and whether the governor lobbied on behalf of foreign interests without registering as a foreign agent. Cooper said that the Justice Department told him there had been no findings of wrongdoing by the governor.
In a statement to TIME, the Justice Department declined to clarify the investigation’s focus. “As a matter of policy, the department generally neither confirms nor denies whether a matter is under investigation,” Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr told TIME.
A wealthy industrialist and port owner from a northern province of China, Wang has multiple business interests in the United States, including a construction firm that has done work on Chinese embassies and a soybean export business. His firm had previously signed a memorandum of understanding with McAuliffe’s predecessor, Gov. Bob McDonnell, to facilitate the export of American soybeans from Virginia ports to China.
According to Wang’s representative, a second meeting between McAuliffe and Wang took place in the state capital of Richmond after McAuliffe’s election to discuss an expansion of a soybean export agreement between Wang and the state. The third meeting took place before McAuliffe became governor, at a dinner in Washington organized by former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, who has registered as a federal lobbyist for one of Wang’s companies.
The Wang representative said that all of his political and philanthropic donations in the U.S. were done at the recommendation of Mark Fung, his legal counsel. In 2012, Fung appeared with Hodges in a video news report for Chinese television from the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., discussing the strategies for winning political influence in the United States. “If you really want to influence, let’s say, U.S.-China policy it is almost worth it to have emphasis and influence on the state level,” he said in the report.
Wang’s representative also said that Wang met twice with former President Bill Clinton to discuss the Clinton foundation, once in the United States and once when Clinton was visiting China.
The Clinton campaign did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for McAuliffe confirmed both the fundraising meeting and a subsequent meeting in Richmond to discuss soybean exports.
http://time.com/4348675/terry-mcauliffe-hillary-clinton-china-investigation/

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Revealed: The State Department’s Hidden Hillary Donors

May 24, 2016 | The Daily Beast

By Shane Harris and Jackie Kucinich

Clinton’s super-donors poured millions into the State Department. Why was the government so reluctant to release the names of these high-rollers and socialites?
Hillary Clinton may have suspended her political career temporarily when she became secretary of state. But the Clinton fundraising machine was in full swing and raising millions of dollars for the State Department under her watch, an analysis by The Daily Beast has found.
More than a dozen donors to Clinton’s non-profit foundation and her various political campaigns poured money into an endowment she launched into 2010 to pay for the upkeep of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms. The 42 sumptuous salons at State Department headquarters in Washington, decorated with 18th and 19th century American furnishings, are used to welcome foreign dignitaries, conduct diplomatic meetings and swearing-in ceremonies, and host official dinners.
By the following year, the campaign had raised more than $20 million to permanently fund restoration and maintenance for the rooms and their collections of rare American artwork, thanks largely to reliable Clinton donors.
Nearly half of the 37 people and organizations who donated to the State Department campaign, known as Patrons of Diplomacy, also gave money to the Clinton Foundation, according to State Department and foundation records. Of the 11 people who served as co-chairs for the campaign, agreeing to contribute their own money or to help raise funds from others, six also gave to the Clinton Foundation, a global charity started by former President Bill Clinton.
Until this week the State Department seemed inclined to keep the names of these patrons private. When The Daily Beast initially asked to see the donor list, a department spokesperson said that it was already the subject of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Republican National Committee, and therefore couldn’t yet be released. (The RNC has filed six lawsuits against the State Department related to Clinton’s tenure, focused on potential conflicts of interest with her and her aides’ work for the foundation, as well as her use of a private email server for official business.
But if the State Department wanted to keep the donors from public scrutiny, it’s not clear why their names are inscribed on a wall, located on a terrace off one of the reception rooms, with a sweeping view of the National Mall.
Only when The Daily Beast pointed out that an article in a 2012 issue of an internal State Department magazine mentions the donor wall was a reporter allowed to see it.
Having a name etched in stone was one of several donor perks, according to a glossy 22-page brochure that describes the important restoration and maintenance work that private contributions have funded over the years (PDF). Taxpayer funds may not be used for the reception rooms, which are open to the public and house a museum-quality collection of furniture, paintings, and documents.
“By becoming a Patron of Diplomacy, you are supporting the ongoing business of American diplomacy and investing in our nation’s future. Gifts to the campaign are tax deductible,” the brochure states.
Donors also receive “invitations to campaign events and ongoing activities,” as well as recognition on a website that has apparently been awaiting an update for the better part of four years. The Daily Beast was able to find an archived section of the website that contains the names of hundreds of donors who have given over the years, most of them before Clinton took office.
The Daily Beast found no evidence that donors to Patrons of Diplomacy had been offered favors or special access to the State Department, beyond what’s spelled out in the brochure. And there’s nothing nefarious about the raising of private funds to pay for public works. Indeed, private donors have been pitching in to support the rooms since 1961.
“The State Department and the Clinton Foundation are separate entities, and we can only speak to our programs and policies,” department spokesperson Mark Toner told The Daily Beast. “All donations to the Patrons of Diplomacy initiative were reviewed by the Department in accordance with applicable rules and regulations.”
But the overlap between the campaign and donors to the Clinton Foundation, as well as Clinton’s political campaigns, may be problematic for the Democratic presidential frontrunner. Along with her husband, Clinton has faced repeated criticism over the years that the foundation serves as a conduit for influencing official decision-making.
In addition to suing for the names of the donors, the RNC has also demanded information that its staff thinks could indicate some quid-pro-quo between donors and those seeking to get on Clinton’s good side (PDF). That information includes solicitations to the patrons campaign, invitations to the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, and visitor logs for Clinton’s “formal quarters” and personal office at State Department headquarters.
“The overlap between donors to the Clinton Foundation and this project raise more questions about influence buying at the Clinton State Department,” Raj Shah, the deputy communications director for the RNC, told The Daily Beast. “It’s becoming clearer by the day that reason Hillary Clinton set up her email server was to conceal unseemly conflicts of interest that were prevalent during her tenure. Now we see that evidence of these conflicts are literally carved in stone.”
Regardless of the RNC’s allegations, it’s clear that even when Clinton is not on the campaign trail, her family’s money-raising machine follows her. Clinton’s fundraising prowess dwarfed previous efforts at the State Department. Tax returns for a non-profit organization that has managed funds for the reception rooms since the 1980s show that, on average, it had about $4.8 million in assets on hand in the four years before Clinton took office. The fund was also losing money. Clinton and her friends and donors raised four times the fund’s assets, for a grand total of $20.3 million.
Clinton also personally pitched donors in a promotional video about the reception rooms and the patrons campaign.
“These rooms are completely paid for and furnished by private donations,” she noted. “The Patrons of Diplomacy is our effort to reach out and include people today who wish to make a contribution to keep these rooms going, to make sure that they remain as beautiful, historically significant, as they are right now.”
“The Diplomatic Reception Rooms enable the Secretary of State and other senior U.S. Government officials to receive distinguished foreign visitors with a touch of our nation’s history,” State Department spokesperson Mark Toner told The Daily Beast in a written statement. “In October 2011, the campaign was successfully completed… thereby ensuring that the Diplomatic Rooms and their Collection will continue to provide an extraordinary venue for American diplomacy for generations to come‎.”
Neither the Clinton Foundation nor the Clinton campaign responded to requests for comment.
State Department spokesman John Kirby also said that the department is currently processing the RNC’s request for the donor names and related information. But there has been a surge in requests under the Freedom of Information Act in recent years, with approximately 22,000 last year alone, he said. The department processes those requests “in an entirely nonpartisan manner,” Kirby added.
The patrons are collectively responsible for at least $33 million in contributions to the Clinton Foundation, according to publicly available records. Many gave donations in the five- and six-figures, with a handful of seven- and eight-figure donors responsible for the lion’s share of the total. Those donors include some of the biggest Clinton fundraisers around, who’ve been supporting her and her husband’s political careers for years.
The Indiana philanthropist Bren Simon was deemed a “Grand Patron” of the patrons campaign, having contributed $1 million or more. She was also named a co-chair of the overall fundraising effort. Simon has also given between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, records show. Her philanthropic foundation, which shares the name of her late husband, the shopping mall magnate Melvin Simon, also gave the foundation between $250,000 and $500,000. And Bren Simon has personally donated the maximum amount under law to Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, as well as to her 2008 run and her earlier campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Several of the patrons donors are among the most devout of the Clinton network over the past few decades. At least three, Fred Eychaner, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, and Dan Abraham, were among 63 people who gave $10,000—the maximum—to Bill Clinton’s legal defense fund, which was set up to pay his legal bills amid the various scandals that dogged his presidency, as well as his impeachment.
(McAuliffe’s own fundraising is now the subject of scrutiny. The FBI is investigating the onetime Clinton Foundation board member for potentially taking illegal campaign contributions, it was reported this week. Investigators are reportedly scrutinizing donations to McAuliffe’s gubernatorial campaign by Chinese billionaire Wang Wenliang, who also gave $2 million to the Clinton Foundation through his company, Rilin Enterprises. McAuliffe formerly served on the foundation’s board.)
At least 18 patrons also gave to Clinton’s various political campaigns ranging from her Senate campaign in 2000 to her current bid for president.
Eychaner, a reclusive media entrepreneur and so-called Hillblazer, has raised at least $100,000 in contributions to Clinton’s presidential campaign. She personally thanked him for serving as a co-chair for Patrons of Diplomacy in her remarks at a 2011 reception to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms.
Eychaner is a rarity among Clinton donors, being one of only seven people who has given $25 million or more to the Clinton Foundation. A 2015 analysis by Politico found confusion over whether Eychaner had personally given the money or donated through his own foundation, Alphawood. But Eychaner’s prominent donor status isn’t in doubt. In the 2016 election cycle, he haspersonally given just over $4 million to Democratic outside spending groups, including political action committees, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Eychaner gave $2 million to Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC backing Clinton for president.
Henry Laufer and his wife, Marsha, whose names are also on the patrons wall, held a fundraiser for Clinton’s presidential run this past April in their South Florida home. And in February, Laufer, a vice president at Renaissance Technologies, donated $500,000 to pro-Clinton Super PAC Correct the Record.
And Ewa and Dan Abraham, a longtime donor for both Bill and Hillary Clinton, underwrote an endowment to care for the terrace at the State Department where the Patrons of Diplomacy memorial wall hangs.
The patrons campaign also drew on the ranks of Washington’s moneyed society, including those who have a long history of giving to cultural and artistic causes.
One of the co-chairs, philanthropist Adrienne Arsht, is a fixture among Washington’s social scene and a major benefactor of the performing arts. She gave $500,000 to the patrons campaign, qualifying her for “Major Philanthropist” statuts. She also hired a Miami marketing firm with which she does business, Republica, to create that glossy brochure brochure (PDF), which was used to pitch other donors.
Arsht, who made her money in Florida banking, also has given the maximum amount allowed to Clinton’s presidential campaign. But she has mostly spent her millions on the city of Miami’s Center for the Performing Arts, the largest in Florida, which bears her name, as well as on major donations to New York’s Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera. Last Saturday, Arsht attended the annual gala for the Washington National Opera, striding confidently in a floor-length blue beaded gown through the hall of the Organization of American States, as members of the city’s arts and philanthropy establishment greeted one of their own.
Arsht is also a preeminent figure in the rarified world of money and society that Clinton herself knows well as a longtime, on-again-off-again resident of the District of Columbia. And the two have socialized together. In July 2012, Clinton attended a small dinner that Arsht hosted at her Washington home for Adm. James Stavridis, the then-commander of U.S. European Command and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, and Stavridis’s wife, according to a copy of Clinton’s schedule that was released along with some of the emails she kept on a private server in her New York home.
Another bastion of the Washington philanthropic establishment, David Rubenstein, was also a co-chair of the patrons campaign and gave at least $1 million. (He has given modestly to the Clinton Foundation, between $5,000 and $10,000, records show.) Rubenstein’s passion—some might say mission—is the preservation of American history and priceless treasures. He personally ponied up half the cost to repair the Washington Monument after it was damaged and closed following a 2012 earthquake, about $7.5 million. And Rubenstein, one of Washington’s few billionaires, lent the State Department a rare 1823 copy of the Declaration of Independence to display in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms. (He has also given an original copy of the Magna Carta that he bought for $21 million to the National Archives, which has a Rubenstein gallery.)
The Daily Beast reached out to several of the top donors to the patrons campaign, including the co-chairs. Rubenstein, the only person to respond, told The Daily Beast that he had been approached to give to the Patrons of Diplomacy campaign, but he didn’t recall by whom.
“There is a long standing program to raise funds to outfit the public rooms at State,” Rubenstein said, noting that the effort first got underway in the early 1960s, when what are now the grand reception rooms were drab, modernist affairs with low ceilings and harsh lighting.
The wife of Secretary of State Christian Herter, who served in the Eisenhower administration from 1959 to 1961, reportedly wept when she first saw the rooms, believing the United States would be humiliated to host heads of state and foreign dignitaries in such a garish venue.
“It looked like a gangster’s molls headquarters on the Twentieth Century-Fox lot,” State Department curator Clement Conger, who is widely credited as the guiding force behind the original plan to remodel the rooms and the subsequent upkeep, told the Christian Science Monitor in 1985. “It was done in completely modern furniture, covered in purple, red, and turquoise, with red at the windows.”
The fundraising campaign that Clinton started, which was overseen by her then chief of protocol, Capricia Marshall, raised Conger’s efforts to a new level and may ensure that the rooms have a reliable source of funds for years to come. Of the $20.3 million raised, $18 million will be used for preservation and the remainder will pay for efforts to “educate people worldwide about the rooms,” which are open for public tours, according to an article in the State Department’s internal magazine.
But Republicans’ suspicions about Clinton’s fundraising efforts are unlikely to be allayed by the work she did to ensure the rooms’ future. And it’s doubtful that her friends and reliable donors would have given so generously were Clinton not running the State Department.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/26/revealed-the-state-department-s-hidden-hillary-donors.html

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Shortchanged by loose money

May 28, 2016 | Daily Press

In a way, the leak of a supposed federal investigation into a campaign donation to Gov.Terry McAuliffe made no sense. In another, it made all the sense in the world.
The reason is the same. Our state campaign finance and political ethics laws are a disgrace. There are essentially no limits on the money that flows into politicians' hands, or on their manipulations to hang on to office or on their ability to hide their deliberations from the public.
When, during the past two decades, we've seen Dominion Resources, parent of the state's largest electric monopoly, pour more than $13 million into politicians' funds, do we really believe it is because the company cares about good government?
Really?
When, in just the past 2012-2015 election cycle, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the state Senate, Thomas K. "Tommy" Norment Jr., R-James City County, and Dick Saslaw, D-Fairfax, received between them more than $650,000 just from Dominion, Verizon, beer and wine wholesalers, bankers, car dealers and high interest rate loan companies, was that a triumph of corporate civic spirit?
Or, to pick on just one of many legislators who rake in cash for campaigns where they face no opponents, what was the motivation of that same gang when they favored House Majority Leader Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, with nearly $1 million during the past two decades?
So of course we wondered what federal investigators were asking when we heard CNN report that they were looking into the $120,000 that New Jersey-based real estate development firm West Legend Corp., dropped on Gov. McAuliffe.
West Legend is controlled by Wang Wenliang, who is a legal resident of the United States, and Gov. McAuliffe's lawyers advised that federal law barring donations from foreigners doesn't apply.
Former Gov. Bob McDonnell's conviction on federal corruption charges involved more than $170,000 of gifts and loans from Virginia businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr. — but that portion of federal law says campaign contributions do not corrupt politicians.
Perhaps the governor felt Mr. Wang's contribution expressed a simple commitment to the high standard of political ethics we aim for in Virginia?
Perhaps, as a one-time delegate to the Chinese National People's Congress, Mr. Wang wanted to bring that body's high standards here?
It couldn't have been anything else, surely. Not in Virginia.
After all, unlike all but five other states, we impose no limits — none at all — on campaign donations.
With that, we've seen the flow of funds, especially from special interests, balloon. Races for seats in the House of Delegates or state Senate regularly see spending exceed $1 million. Candidates for governor in 2013 spent nearly $60 million — and that doesn't count the millions more that independent committees spent.
With that money has come new depths in bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping attack ads.
With that money has come a legislature that has significantly slackened Virginia's consumer protection laws.
With that money has come egregious gerrymandering that lets politicians select their voters, rather than ensuring that it is voters who select their representatives.
We could fix this.
We could, for instance, follow the lead of our neighbors in Kentucky and North Carolina. They ban corporate contributions. They limit how much an individuals or political action committee can give: $1,000 in Kentucky, $5,000 in North Carolina. They're not even the strictest: in the conservative bastion of Montana, corporations are barred from making donations and individuals and PACS are limited the $650 for gubernatorial races and $170 for state legislators.
It'd be tough to influence even a Virginia governor or state legislator with that kind of money. Oddly, though, the General Assembly's ever-enthusiastic efforts to tighten ethics rules never, ever, ever touch the question of campaign donations. We wonder why.
Thomas Jefferson, as ever, offers guidance for a path forward.
"This I hope will be the age of experiments in government, and that their basis will be founded on principles of honesty," he wrote, back in 1796.
Let us now experiment with a comprehensive reform of our laws on political ethics and accountability.
Let us now:
• Limit campaign contributions by individuals and political action committees.
• Ban contributions by corporations.
• Require more detailed — and audited — conflicts of interest reporting.
• Establish an independent redistricting commission, which Iowa has proved can work.
• Limit the ways elected officials — from the governor to the General Assembly to Clerks of the Circuit Courts — can hide what they do by closing the loopholes that cover them in theFreedom of Information Act.
And let us try this experiment, too:
Tell our elected officials, and would-be officials, that until we get real ethics and accountability reform, they will not get our votes.

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Who is Wang Wenliang, Chinese businessman who donated to McAuliffe?

May 25, 2016 | The Roanoke Times

By Robert Zullo

In China, it’s called “guanxi,” translated as “connections” or “relationships.”
“There is a long-standing tradition in Chinese culture and history of building relationships. And money can come into that as well,” said James Mann, a former foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and author of four books on U.S.-China relations who is currently an author-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University. “It can be as benign as cultivating someone who can help get your kid into college to buying them off.”
Wang Wenliang, the Chinese billionaire whose $120,000 in donations in 2013 to Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s campaign and inaugural committee have been identified in news reports as a part of a federal investigation into McAuliffe, has spent much time and money on guanxi in the United States over the past six years.
Wang is the founder and head of Rilin Enterprises, a privately held company with interests in construction, ports, agriculture and electric power. It’s based in Liaoning Province, China.
He made headlines last year when news reports revealed a $2 million donation in 2013 to the Clinton Foundation, the nonprofit run by the political family with deep ties to McAuliffe. The governor is a former Democratic Party chairman, major party fundraiser and board member of the Clinton Global Initiative, part of the foundation.
In 2010, a grant from Rilin launched the Center on U.S.-China Relations at New York University. Two years later, Wang pledged $25 million to support and expand NYU’s Global Network University. He is a member of NYU’s board of trustees and is also a donor and advisory committee member at Harvard University’s Asia Center.
Representatives for NYU and Harvard did not respond to requests for additional details on Wang’s relationship with the universities.
The businessman, whose firm and its subsidiaries also control the Dandong Port Group, which manages a deepwater facility on the border with North Korea, also contributed a grant to launch the Zbigniew Brzezinski Institute on Geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonprofit Washington policy research organization with a focus on defense and security, among other issues.
And in Virginia, in a 2011 news release, Gov. Bob McDonnell boasted of a trade deal between Dandong Port Group Co. and Perdue AgriBusiness, which operates grain storage facilities in Virginia and an oilseed crush plant in Chesapeake, that shipped Perdue’s soybeans to the Dandong Pasite Grain and Oilseed Co., another Rilin affiliate.
A 2013 memorandum of understanding increased the export of soybeans to Dandong to 29 million bushels, though a Perdue spokeswoman said Tuesday that the agreement was not renewed.
“Perdue AgriBusiness is not currently shipping to and does not have any orders with Dandong Port Group or its affiliates,” the spokeswoman, Julie DeYoung, wrote in an email.
Federal lobbying disclosure forms also reveal that the Dandong Port Group hired McGuireWoods Consulting, part of the Richmond-headquartered legal and lobbying firm, in 2012 to take up “trade and business development issues” on its behalf.
On the roster of lobbyists was Frank Donatelli; a former deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee and onetime assistant to President Ronald Reagan; former Democratic South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges; former Democratic Virginia Congressman L.F. Payne Jr.; and Mona Mahib, a former U.S. Labor Department and White House official and former director of communications for the Democratic Governors Association who worked on four presidential campaigns.
In a statement Tuesday night, Hodges said McGuireWoods Consulting has represented Dandong Port Co. on “a variety of business and government relations matters” for more than seven years.
“Although we no longer provide government-relations services to the company, we do continue to assist it in business-related matters when called upon,” said Hodges, a senior adviser for McGuireWoods Consulting.
“Mr. Wang, a principal in Dandong Port, is a Chinese-American business leader with interests in ports, real estate, agribusiness and other areas of business. We helped Mr. Wang’s business in 2013 to make the largest purchase of Virginia soybeans in the commonwealth’s history. Mr. Wang has continued to explore other opportunities to invest in the United States over the years and has also supported philanthropic causes here.”
McGuireWoods introduced Wang “to then-private citizen Terry McAuliffe” during the McDonnell administration, Hodges said.
“To the best of my recollection, this occurred shortly after the soybean agreement was announced,” he said.
McAuliffe said Tuesday that he was “not sure he ever met” Wang.
“I know the folks who worked on his company,” he said, insisting the donation is legal in any event because Wang has held a green card since 2007.
McAuliffe added that he and the Clintons “travel in the same circles” and that donors to the Clinton Foundation have been “friends of mine for years and years.”
He said that every check that came into his campaign was fully vetted, including the check he received from one of Wang’s companies, West Legend Corp. of Jersey City, N.J.
That’s where, in a 2011 raid, Jersey City police and inspectors found about 30 Rilin workers living in two cramped houses, according to the Jersey Journal. The New York Times, reporting last year on the purchase of expensive New York real estate by shell companies, including one created by Wang, said the inspectors found a similar situation in 2013 and that the Rilin workers were working for the Chinese Embassy.
What all the connections amount to, Mann said, is building influence, but to what purpose?
“Is this simply personal, or is there some purpose related to Chinese intelligence,” he said. “It certainly raises that question.”
He noted that Wang’s work on embassies and in ports require close ties to China’s ruling Communist Party and its security apparatus. Wang has also been a delegate to China’s National People’s Congress, the nation’s “rubber stamp” legislature, Mann said, though he considered that of lesser importance.
“In the last 10 or 15 years, as China’s businesses have developed, the party has shown greater tolerance of people rising in business who aren’t party members. But even if you’re not a party member, you have to be on good terms with the party,” he said.
Attempts to reach Wang for comment were unsuccessful.
http://www.roanoke.com/news/politics/who-is-wang-wenliang-chinese-businessman-who-donated-to-mcauliffe/article_9c7b0fff-ad57-5ae7-9782-36e41bf43df7.html

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McAuliffe met Wang at least 3 times

May 26, 2016 | Daily Press

By Travis Fain

RICHMOND – Gov. Terry McAuliffe met three times with the wealthy Chinese businessman wrapped up in controversy this week courtesy of media reports that the U.S. Department of Justice was probing his campaign contributions to the governor.
The governor's attorney has since said DOJ officials told him the investigation doesn't deal with campaign donations at all, but with a review of McAuliffe's dealings before he became governor, and whether he lobbied the U.S. government for a foreign entity.
The department has told the governor, through Washington attorney James W. Cooper, that the investigation has found no indication that he did, Cooper and McAuliffe have said.
"I've never lobbied for a foreign government here, ever," the governor said Thursday.
Department of Justice sources have declined to comment on the case, citing standard policy. The full scope of the investigation remains unclear beyond what Cooper has released and what anonymous sources have told reporters.
McAuliffe's association with Chinese billionaire Wang Wenliang came up Monday, when CNN report indicated that Wang's $120,000 in political donations drew the attention of federal investigators.
McAuliffe initially said he didn't believe he'd met Wang, who ships soy beans from the Port of Virginia. He has since acknowledged that he likely did, though he has consistently said he doesn't remember the man.
They met three times, according to a D.C.-based spokeswoman for Wang.
Once was at a dinner set by former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges. Wang's spokeswoman described this as a dinner with dozens of people and said it occurred before McAuliffe's second run for governor, when McAuliffe was "an American businessman investing in China, and Mr. Wang was making American investments."
Hodges also confirmed the meeting.
Wang came to the governor's mansion for coffee early in the McAuliffe administration, McAuliffe spokesman Brian Coy said after reviewing old schedules. McAuliffe said Thursday that Secretary of Agriculture Todd Haymore brought Wang to the mansion that day, something he had forgotten.
The two were also together for a McAuliffe campaign event in September 2013, held at the home of McAuliffe's longtime friend, and the current Democratic presidential front-runner, Hillary Clinton.
Time magazine reported late Wednesday that McAuliffe invited Wang to this fundraiser. Wang's spokeswoman said that's not an accurate characterization. She described the event as a McAuliffe fundraiser "with over 100 other guests."
McAuliffe said there were some 300 people there.
"People come to fundraisers, I'm sorry," he said during a radio interview Thursday with WRVA.
The governor said his staff has pieced things together this week, reminding him of meetings. At one point, McAuliffe thought Wang had come to his inauguration, an event the businessman put $50,000 toward.
"I thought he was at the inaugural, he wasn't at the inaugural," McAuliffe told the Daily Press Thursday. "Wouldn't know him if he walked right down these stairs and said hello to me."
Whatever the scope of this investigation, it has had some political fallout for the governor. He canceled a scheduled appearance next month with Ohio Senate candidate Ted Strickland. This is the only canceled political event thus far, Coy said.
The governor said he believes the whole matter will go away soon, and hopes the Department of Justice will comment publicly on the results.
"I think it's going to go away very quickly, because they have told my attorney that there are no issues with Mr. McAuliffe," the governor said Thursday afternoon.

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Clinton Ally Terry McAuliffe Investigated for 2013 Campaign Donations

May 23, 2016 | U.S News

By Gabrielle Levy

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a swing-state Democrat and close Clinton ally, is under investigation by the FBI and the Justice Department over donations to his 2013 gubernatorial campaign.
CNN, which broke the news Monday, reports that that the investigation stretches back more than a year and is centered on donations McAuliffe received during the campaign. The network did not have additional details of the probe.
According to the CNN report, the FBI became interested in the donations McAuliffe received during the gubernatorial campaign – including those made by Wang Wenliang, the billionaire chairman of the China Rilin Construction Group. A former delegate to China's National People's Congress, Wang donated $120,000 to McAuliffe's campaign through his U.S. businesses, CNN reported.
"Neither the governor nor his former campaign has knowledge of this matter, but as reported, contributions to the campaign from Mr. Wang were completely lawful," Marc Elias, a spokesman for the governor, told the network.
Wang's philanthropy includes big-dollar gifts to New York University, Harvard University and environmental causes. He also gave $2 million to the Clinton Global Initiative, the charitable foundation run by former President Bill Clinton.
Under U.S. law, candidates for federal, state or local office are prohibited from accepting donations from foreign nationals. A spokeswoman for Wang told CNN the businessman holds permanent U.S. resident status, which would make him eligible to donate.
Neither Wang nor McAuliffe were informed by the FBI of the investigation, according to the CNN report.
"The Governor will certainly cooperate with the government if he is contacted about it," Elias said.
McAuliffe and the Clintons have been close friends for three decades; their families even vacation together.
The governor, who previously served as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was a co-chair for Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign and has been a frequent surrogate around the country and in Virginia – a swing state that could be crucial to her White House chances in November.
In March, McAuliffe said he would decline if Clinton asks him to be her running mate.
"I've got a job I've always wanted to be – governor," he said. "I'm really trying to push Hillary on taking one of our two great United States Senators [Tim Kaine or Mark Warner]. I love being governor. I've always worked for myself and I just don't see being number two anywhere."
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-05-23/clinton-ally-terry-mcauliffe-investigated-for-2013-campaign-donations

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Did This Chinese Billionaire Try to Buy Hillary Clinton and Terry McAuliffe?

May 24, 2016 | The Daily Beast

By Betsy Woodruff, Gideon Resnick and Shane Harris

Oh, Terry.
Virginia’s party boy-turned-governor Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend andconfidant of the Clintons, is being investigated by the FBI and Department of Justice for potentially taking illegal campaign contributions.
The governor’s office told CNN, which broke the story, that it was not aware the investigation was under way and that it would cooperate if asked. Details are vague, but the investigation involves Chinese billionaire businessman Wang Wenliang, who now has the rare distinction of causing problems for both McAuliffe and Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton. It’s complicated—and it highlights just how much Clinton and McAuliffe’s questionable shared connections haunt their political dreams.
The investigation also involves the Clinton Foundation, according to CNN.CBS reported last year that Wang’s company, Rilin Enterprises, pledged in 2013 to give the organization $2 million. CNN noted that there is “no allegation” of impropriety on the foundation’s part and that McAuliffe formerly served on its board. Last year, the foundation’s decision to accept Wang’s company’s pledge drew pointed criticism because of Wang’s ties to the Chinese government—the billionaire used to be a delegate to the country’s parliament.
“Indirectly the Clinton Foundation has political influence, that’s why people give to it,” Jim Mann, former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, told CBS. “People give to the Clinton Foundation particularly because it is the Clintons and because they are prominent politicians in the United States.”
The Department of Justice and the FBI both declined to discuss their investigation with The Daily Beast, and a spokesperson for McAuliffe said the governor would cooperate.
Wang and his company have spent big to influence American politics—$1.4 million from 2012 to 2015 to lobby Congress and the State Department, according to CBS’s estimate. And Dandong Port Co., a subsidiary of Rilin Enterprises, has hired former politicos to lobby for its interests, as lobbying disclosure forms show.
It has also shelled out for nongovernmental efforts, including a grant to New York University in 2010 to create a center for U.S.-China Relations, as well asa grant to launch the Zbigniew Brzezinski Institute on Geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in 2014.
Rilin Enterprises isn’t the first Chinese business to get mixed up in McAuliffe problems. McAuliffe and Tony Rodham, Hillary Clinton’s brother, courted Chinese investors for the troubled electric car company GreenTech Automotive. Politico called Rodham “a kind of traveling salesman” for the company.
During McAuliffe’s 2013 gubernatorial campaign, his work with the companybecame a liability—especially because of allegations that McAuliffe and Rodham used their political connections to unfairly expedite the visa process for their investors. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general issued a report in 2015 saying a top official there, Alejandro Mayorkas, made “an appearance of favoritism and special access.”
“Mayorkas intervened in an administrative appeal related to the denial of a regional center’s application to receive EB-5 funding to manufacture electric cars through investments in a company in which Terry McAuliffe was the board chairman,” the report says. “The intervention was unprecedented and, because of the political prominence of the individuals involved, as well as USCIS’s traditional deference to its administrative appeals process, staff perceived it as politically motivated.”
Mayorkas denied the allegations, according to Politico, and hasn’t faced any criminal charges. GreenTech, meanwhile, has also drawn scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
McAuliffe’s problems often rope in the Clintons, as in the case of Tony Rodham and GreenTech, because of his longtime status as a close confidant of Bill and Hillary. He co-chaired Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential re-election bid and Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign. Bill Clinton has praised McAuliffe as a smooth-talking operator, once saying he “could talk an owl out of a tree,”according to The New York Times.
“Absolutely, I would buy a new car from Terry,” Clinton told Times reporter Mark Leibovich in 2012. “But a used car? I am not so sure about a used car.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/23/chinese-donor-linked-to-terry-mcauliffe-probe-also-caused-trouble-for-hillary.html

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Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe's Campaign Fundraising Reportedly Under FBI Investigation

May 23, 2016 | Slate

By Elliot Hannon

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe is under investigation by the FBI and Justice Department to determine whether his 2013 gubernatorial campaign broke any fundraising laws, CNN reported Monday. The main drift of the probe appears to revolve around McAuliffe’s time as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative and the overlap of donors to the Clinton Foundation and his campaign for governor. More than 100 donors contributed to the foundation, as well as to McAuliffe’s campaign, NBC News reports.
Simple overlap would not necessarily indicate any wrongdoing on McAuliffe’s behalf; the Clinton friend and ally has been a long-time Democratic fundraiser as head of the Democratic National Committee from 2000 to 2005 and later for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Officials tell CNN there are no allegations against the Clinton Foundation, but that there are questions about some foreign donors, particularly Chinese businessman Wang Wenliang.
Here’s more from CNN:Among the McAuliffe donations that drew the interest of the investigators was $120,000 from a Chinese businessman, Wang Wenliang, through his U.S. businesses. Wang was previously delegate to China's National People's Congress, the country's ceremonial legislature. Wang also has been a donor to the Clinton foundation, pledging $2 million. He also has been a prolific donor to other causes, including to New York University, Harvard and environmental issues in Florida. U.S. election law prohibits foreign nationals from donating to federal, state or local elections. Penalties for violations include fines and/or imprisonment. But Wang holds U.S. permanent resident status, according to a spokeswoman, which would make him a U.S. person under election law and eligible to donate to McAuliffe's campaign.
The federal investigation dates back to last year, but was not disclosed to McAuliffe. "The Governor will certainly cooperate with the government if he is contacted about it," an attorney for the McAuliffe campaign told CNN in a statement.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/05/23/virginia_gov_terry_mcauliffe_campaign_fundraising_reportedly_under_fbi_investigation.html

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Election Fraud in China

An Unlikely Crime in One-Party China: Election Fraud

Sep 14, 2016 | The New York Times

By Michael Forsythe

HONG KONG — China’s legislature has expelled 45 of its members in a vote-buying scandal that has snared a prominent businessman who is active in donating to American universities, foundations and political campaigns.
Some of the lawmakers whose dismissals were announced on Tuesday, all from the economically struggling northeastern province of Liaoning, had bribed their way into the National People’s Congress by buying votes, according to the official news agency Xinhua.
The nearly 3,000 members of the congress, which meets as a full body for less than two weeks each March, ratify laws and government programs, usually with little drama. Members are mostly voted in by lower-ranking organizations, including provincial congresses.
The businessman, Wang Wenliang, is a billionaire who made his fortune in the construction business and from operating a strategic port on the North Korean border. Mr. Wang has also been linked with entities holding hidden stakes in three condominiums in the Time Warner Center in New York.
Through his companies, Mr. Wang has donated to American universities, charities, research institutes and political campaigns, including New York University, the Clinton Foundation and the successful 2013 campaign for Virginia governor of Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat. Though Mr. Wang is a Chinese citizen, he is also a legal permanent resident of the United States, which entitles him to make campaign contributions.
A woman answering the phone at the China Rilin Construction Group, a company in Liaoning where Mr. Wang serves as chairman, said that he was on a business trip and unavailable to comment.
Sig Rogich, an adviser to Mr. Wang who is based in Las Vegas, said his client was a philanthropist, an environmentalist and “a man of great integrity.”
Zhang Dejiang, the chairman of the National People’s Congress, told lawmakers on Tuesday that the bribery scandal, which resulted in the expulsion of almost half of the province’s delegation, was unprecedented in the history of the People’s Republic of China, Xinhua reported. He vowed to show “no mercy.”
Often derided as a rubber-stamp legislature, the congress and its companion advisory body have in recent years become a club for some of China’s wealthiest executives, keen to rub elbows with government officials. Holding such high office also brings prestige and, much like peerage or knighthood in Britain, is seen as a marker of status in the Communist Party-dominated establishment. In China, it is sometimes known as “wearing the red hat.”
“People within the system can trade interests,” Zhang Ming, a political scientist at Renmin University in Beijing, said by telephone. “Whoever gets elected will have a pass to do so.”
Serving as a lawmaker has become so attractive to the wealthy that last year, of the 1,271 richest Chinese people tracked by the Shanghai-based Hurun Report, a record 203, or more than one in seven, were delegates to the National People’s Congress or its advisory body. The richest person that year among all three branches of the United States government, Representative Darrell Issa of California, would only rank as the 166th richest if he were a Chinese lawmaker.
“For reasons that don’t make sense to outsiders given the ‘rubber stamp’ nature of the N.P.C., membership in any honorary body is coveted by people who see it as a mark of social status, something to add to their resumes,” said Suzanne Pepper, a scholar based in Hong Kong who studies Chinese elections.
Many of the expelled delegates are executives of private businesses or leaders of state-owned companies, rather than career politicians and military officers — who are also well represented on the body.
The vote-buying scandal in Liaoning has been brewing for at least five years, with hundreds of officials and lawmakers in its provincial bodies accused of engaging in the bribery, according to a report in Caixin, a well-regarded Chinese newsmagazine. The report, posted online on Tuesday, has since been taken off the internet.
In 2013, in the southern province of Hunan, 56 provincial lawmakers in one city had offered more 110 million renminbi, or $16.5 million, in vote-related bribes to lower-ranking officials there, Xinhua reported at the time.
Delegates to the National People’s Congress are elected for five-year terms. The current term began in 2013.
News that China faced new accusations of election fraud has drawn some tart comments on social media from people who are not accustomed to what for some in other countries can be an all-consuming obsession with following electoral politics. Usually, Chinese audiences read about elections in other countries.
“When I saw the news about the vote buying scandal in Liaoning, I was shocked,” wrote one user on Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-like social media platform. “I didn’t know there were elections in the motherland!”

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Donor to Clinton Foundation, McAuliffe caught up in Chinese cash-for-votes scandal

Sep 16, 2016 | The Washington Post

By Laura Vozzella and Simon Denyer

Wang Wenliang, a Chinese billionaire and donor to the Clinton Foundation and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, has been expelled from China’s top legislature after being caught up in a widespread cash-for-votes scheme.
On Tuesday, China’s national legislature expelled 45 of its nearly 2,900 members, all from the northeastern province of Liaoning, in a huge vote-buying scandal. The move was part of an investigation into corruption in Liaoning and a much larger national anti-corruption campaign launched by President Xi Jinping.
Wang, who made his fortune in construction and running a strategic port near the North Korean border, also has been a big donor to New York University, Harvard University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Wang’s $2 million donation to the Clinton Foundation in 2013 made waves when it was disclosed last year because of his ties to the Chinese government. More recently, his name surfaced amid news that McAuliffe (D) was the subject of an FBI investigation.
McAuliffe expressed confidence in May that Wang, who gave a combined $120,000 to his 2013 gubernatorial campaign and 2014 inauguration, was a “legitimate donor.”
A spokesman for Wang said his ouster was the result of a political “purge” carried out on behalf of Xi.
“They get rid of people who are not part of his team,” spokesman Sig Rogich said.
He said Wang and the others ousted had only “lobbied decision-makers” with meals and token gifts. “He wined and dined them and gave them a gift,” Rogich said. “It’s not like they gave them cash.”
On Friday, McAuliffe’s attorney, James W. Cooper, said the governor “knows nothing about Mr. Wang and his legal situation in China.”
Spokesmen for the Clinton campaign and the Clinton Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
Wang’s construction conglomerate, Rilin Enterprises, controls the Port of Dandong and processes significant volumes of soybeans shipped out of Virginia. He was courted in 2011 by Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R), who encouraged Wang’s firm to buy 100,000 metric tons of soybeans from Maryland-based Perdue Agribusiness and ship them from Chesapeake, Va., to China.
Wang’s company also helped build the new Chinese Embassy in Washington, assembling and overseeing a team of artisans who would be loyal to both the Chinese government and the principles of feng shui.
“There’s a lot of security involved,” Rogich said. “They’re also artistically knowledgeable about what the Chinese want. There’s a lot of feng shui that goes into this, evidently — depictions of the four seasons. . . . Certain colors are not allowed.”
Wang’s $2 million pledge to the Clinton Foundation drew attention last year, first from CBS News and then other outlets, because of his connections to the Chinese government — both as a member of the National People’s Congress and as a contractor entrusted to help build China’s embassies around the world.
Wang’s political donations to McAuliffe reflect sizable overlap in Clinton and McAuliffe donors. Critics say the pattern suggests contributions to McAuliffe, a close friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s, are intended to curry favor with a former president and an aspiring one. McAuliffe supporters say the overlap is the natural outgrowth of personal and political bonds the governor has forged over a long career as a Clinton fundraiser.
Foreign nationals are prohibited under federal law from making political contributions. So are American subsidiaries of foreign corporations if they are financed in any way by their parent companies or if individual foreign nationals are involved in the decision to make the donation.
But a foreign national can donate personally or through an American subsidiary if he holds a green card, which Rogich said is the case for Wang.
Wang’s name surfaced again in May, when news leaked that the FBI was investigating McAuliffe. CNN, citing anonymous sources, reported at the time that investigators were interested in a contribution the Chinese citizen had made to McAuliffe.
The FBI probe remains ongoing, two people familiar with the investigation told The Post, and Wang is one piece of it, one of the people said.
Investigators also are assessing whether McAuliffe ran afoul of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, an obscure statute that regulates U.S. citizens’ lobbying of the U.S. government on behalf of foreign governments. They also are examining financial transactions dating back to when he was chairman of the Democratic National Committee, trying to determine if the DNC benefits were illegally linked to Democratic donors, two people said. They are focused on foreign contributors, including Wang and someone from Saudi Arabia, one of the people said.
One of the people said there is some skepticism among those supervising the case that criminal wrongdoing occurred — particularly in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling that tossed out the corruption case against McDonnell.
Cooper said that McAuliffe had done nothing wrong, that the investigation was unrelated to Wang and that the McDonnell case had no bearing on the McAuliffe probe.
“This is not a corruption investigation,” Cooper said. “McDonnell was a bribery case. This is not a bribery case. It has nothing to do with it. . . . This is an investigation mainly into whether there’s a Foreign Agents Registration Act [violation].”
He also slammed the fact that news of an investigation had leaked to the public.
“I cannot overstate how improper it is for government officials to put out information — particularly false information — about matters they have under inquiry,” he said.
The shake-up in China, which was first reported by the New York Times, affects China’s National People’s Congress. The body is usually seen as a rubber-stamp body to provide a cloak of legal legitimacy to Communist Party rule. Its members meet only once a year for around two weeks to receive reports from government ministries and the provinces, and to approve policies and the appointment of top leaders, including the president.
The NPC’s members are elected every five years from provincial, county and township bodies, although the process is tightly controlled by the party and is very opaque.
Membership in the NPC conveys not only status and prestige but access to the top levels of the party and business elite that run China. Many of China’s top business leaders are also members of the NPC.
Wang’s connections to the Chinese government run deep. He once worked as an economic adviser to the municipal government in his home town of Dandong in Liaoning. He was a guest at a banquet to welcome Xion his state visit to Washington last year.
Wang, who was born in 1954, has generated some favorable press for sponsoring a conservation project in China’s largest wetlands near the North Korea border and for donating to a mangrove restoration project in Naples, Fla.
Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) last year recognized Wang’s efforts to restore Dandong Yalu River Estuary Wetland in China, making a statement on the Senate floor, according to a news release issued by Rogich’s Las Vegas-based firm. Reid’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
In China last week, the Liaoning state prosecutor announced it was investigating the former vice head of the provincial legislature, Zheng Yuzhuo, for taking bribes and other illegal acts relating to elections. The province’s former Communist Party chief, Wang Min, was taken into custody in August and expelled from the party on suspicion of taking bribes.
According to state media, some 740,000 officials have been disciplined or punished in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, which is just under 1 percent of the total party membership. Experts say the campaign has also been used to purge rival factions within the party.
It was unclear why Liaoning’s legislature has been targeted for such a clear-out — either as a warning to other provinces or because it had offended the leadership in some other way. It is a bastion of state-run heavy industry and may have been dragging its feet in implementing the kind of economic reforms the central government is demanding, some analysts said.
Most of those caught up in the probe included top business leaders and executives of state-run organizations. It was unclear if further legal action would be taken against them.
“What has happened to the Standing Committee of Liaoning’s provincial People’s Congress is unheard of in the history of China” since the Communist Party takeover in 1949, Li Jianguo, a vice chairman of the NPC Standing Committee was quoted as saying.
But in fact, all that is unusual is that people are paying the price for buying votes, independent experts said.
“This is really common in China, it is not a new thing,” said Zhang Ming, a politics professor at Renmin University of China in Beijing. “A huge number of people are spending money on this, including big bosses from state-owned enterprises, officials and big bosses from private companies.”
He said the scandal had not caused any real outrage in China because it was not a surprise.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/clinton-foundation-mcauliffe-donor-caught-up-in-chinese-cash-for-votes-scandal/2016/09/16/bfb3b8fc-7c13-11e6-ac8e-cf8e0dd91dc7_story.html

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Major Clinton Foundation Donor Ensnared In Chinese Vote-Buying Scandal

Sep 15, 2016 | Daily Caller

By Chuck Ross

A Chinese billionaire who has contributed $2 million to the Clinton Foundation and attended a fundraiser at Hillary Clinton’s home in 2013 has been kicked out of China’s National People’s Congress on accusations of bribing his way into office.
The New York Times reports that Wang Wenliang is one of 45 lawmakers from China’s Liaoning province who attained positions in the National People’s Congress by paying for votes.
Xinhua, China’s official news agency, first reported the news.
Wenliang, who is a Chinese citizen with legal permanent resident status in the U.S. controls a vast construction empire with interests across the globe, including here.
One of his companies, Rilin Enterprises, donated $2 million to the Clinton Foundation in 2013. That same year, another Wenliang outfit, Dandong Port Co., contributed $120,000 to longtime Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe’s campaign for Virginia governor.
The Clintons hosted a fundraiser at their Washington D.C. residence for McAuliffe on Sept. 30, 2013. Wenliang attended the function.
McAuliffe’s involvement with Wenliang is reportedly at the center of an ongoing federal investigation. CNN reported in May that the Justice Department was looking into whether Wenliang’s donations to McAuliffe broke federal law.
There is also some evidence that Wenliang’s contribution to the Clinton Foundation led to an FBI investigation referral.
CNN reported last month that the FBI and three Justice Department field offices recommended that an investigation be opened into donations given to the Clinton Foundation by a foreign donor. The FBI had received a tip about “suspicious activity” from an unnamed bank.
While the report did not name the foreign donor, the possible Clinton Foundation probe was discussed at a joint meeting of FBI and Justice Department officials earlier this year at the same time that the McAuliffe investigation was discussed.
The McAuliffe investigation was allowed to proceed while the Clinton Foundation inquiry was vetoed by the DOJ.
Wenliang has another link to Clinton through the State Department.
A Daily Caller investigation revealed that Dandong Port Co., the Wenliang firm that gave to McAuliffe, lobbied Clinton’s State Department in early 2013 on “selected visa issues” for visitors to the U.S. The Chinese firm paid $120,000 to McGuireWoods Consulting, a Washington D.C. lobbying firm that employees several lobbyists who have bundled hundreds of thousands of dollars for Clinton’s presidential campaign.
When the McAuliffe investigation was first revealed, the former Democratic National Committee chairman initially denied knowing Wenliang. But video soon surfaced of him walking into the 2013 Clinton fundraiser with the Chinese billionaire.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/15/major-clinton-foundation-donor-ensnared-in-chinese-vote-buying-scandal/

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Chinese Clinton Foundation Donor Prompts Attack on Hillary Clinton - Trump Camp

Sep 16, 2016 | Sputnik

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been compromised by a Chinese donor to the Clinton Foundation who is now ensnared in a vote-buying scandal in China, Trump campaign Senior Communications Advisor Jason Miller said in a statement on Thursday.

Chinese billionaire Wang Wenliang was among 45 lawmakers who were expelled from China’s rubber-stamp National People’s Congress in a scandal that involved mass vote buying, Chinese media reported on Tuesday.

"If this is the type of person Hillary Clinton would let into her private home, it should trouble every American who she might let into the White House," Miller stated. Miller said that Wang, a Chinese citizen, attended a 2013 fundraiser at Clinton’s house in Washington, DC.
"This is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of troubling revelations involving the Clinton Foundation and a reminder of how badly compromised Hillary Clinton would be as president," Miller added.

Wang has permanent residency in the United States, according to the New York Times, which has confirmed Wang’s expulsion from the Chinese legislature.
https://sputniknews.com/us/20160916/1045355187/chinese-donor-compromise-hillary-clinton.html

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Voting scandal in China leads to dismissal of 45 national legislators

Sep 22, 2016 | Concordiensis

By Lisa Hladik

China’s national legislature voted to dismiss 45 of its members on September 13 due to allegations of voter fraud. These legislators were all representatives of China’s northeastern province of Liaoning, which is going through an economic downturn.
Taking advantage of the province’s economic vulnerability, the dismissed lawmakers had bribed their way into the National People’s Congress by buying votes, reported the official press agency Xinhua. The National People’s Congress contains almost 3,000 members and meets for a period of less than two weeks per year.
However, members still wield considerable influence through their responsibilities of ratifying laws and government programs. Usually, members are elected to the legislature by lower-ranking bodies of government, such as provincial congresses.
The dismissals followed quickly on the heels of the announcement of an investigation begun the previous week. The investigation was centered around the former vice head of the Liaoning provincial legislature Zheng Yuzhuo, who was suspected of taking bribes and committing other types of fraud in relation to elections.
State prosecutors have asserted their intention of taking legal action against Zheng Yuzhuo, which will likely result in formal charges and a trial. The scandal is also encircling prominent businessman Wang Wenliang, a billionaire in the construction business that operates out of a strategic port on the border with North Korea.
Mr. Wang is known for using his companies as vehicles for donating to American universities, charities, research institutions and political campaigns, notes the New York Times. Chair of the National People’s Congress, Zhang Dejiang is planning to come down hard on the voting scandal culprits.
The widespread scandal, which has resulted in the dismissal of almost half of a province’s delegation, is unprecedented in the People’s Republic of China. Mr. Dejiang is resolved to show “no mercy.” This legislature has often been criticized because its members are predominantly wealthy Chinese business executives.
Many see the presence of these executives playing an active role in the national government as evidence of attempts at jockeying for political favor with government officials. Zhang Ming, a political scientist at the Renmin University in Bejing, notes, “People within the system can trade interests. Whoever gets elected will have a pass to do so.”
Because this legislature holds little de-facto power, this furthers legitimizes what some claim as only a “club” for the wealthy. Even beyond any possible political advantages that come with being a part of the legislature, holding high office within the Communist Party is a source of pride and prestige.
In recent years especially, there is an increasing trend of the prevalence of wealthy individuals in the National People’s Congress. This past year alone, of the 1,271 wealthiest people in China, a record 203 either served in the legislature or acted as advisors to the National People’s Congress.
That means one in seven of China’s wealthiest individuals were actively involved in the government this past year. Many of the delegates who were dismissed following the exposure of the voting fraud scandal fit into this mold of a wealthy businessman that has become so predominant in the Congress.
Most of those expelled were executivs of private business or leaders of state-owned companies. However, the harsh dismissal will not likely change the character of the National People’s Congress any time in the near future.
This scandal has been brewing for five years, according to the New York Times, and may include hundreds of lawmakers, hinted Caixin in a recently deleted post.
http://www.concordy.com/world/2016/09/voting-scandal-in-china-leads-to-dismissal-of-45-national-legislators/

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