Clinton
Foundation mega-donor and longtime Clinton family friend Gilbert Chagoury was
denied a visitor visa by the State Department in 2015 for terrorism-related
reasons according to government documents, the LA Times reports.
Chagoury’s
visa denial derived from his political support for Michel Aoun, a Lebanese
Christian politician whose political party is part of a coalition with
Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim group backed by Iran and which currently holds a
terrorist organization classification by the U.S. government.
According to
the LA Times, “Last summer, when Chagoury planned a trip to Los Angeles, he
applied at the U.S. embassy in Paris for a visitor’s visa and was refused,
according to interviews and government documents.
“Based on
the FBI report and other allegations from intelligence and law enforcement
sources, the State Department denied the application,” the paper reported. “It
cited terrorism-related grounds, a broad category that can apply to anyone
believed to have assisted a terrorist group in any way, including providing
money.”
Chagoury’s
connection to the Clintons date back decades. Chagoury was among the 250 guests
who attended the Clintons’ White House Christmas party in 1996, that was just
two months after he donated $460,000 to a controversial pro-Clinton Miami-based
Democratic voter-registration group.
Chagoury has
a long history of legal drama. Once known as the “Kingpin” of Nigerian
corruption, Chagoury’s name was once added to a federal terrorist no-fly list
back in 2010. After spending several months and thousands in legal fees,
Chagoury convinced the U.S. to issue him a written apology, granting him a
waiver to fly freely to the U.S. again. The U.S. government did not however
provide an explanation for Chagoury’s being added to the list in the first
place.
The
billionaires name also appeared in email exchanges from when Hillary Clinton
was Secretary of State.
In one email
exchange, Clinton Foundation senior official Doug Band emailed Clinton’s
closest aid Huma Abedin and aid Cheryl Mills requesting help connecting
Chagoury with the State Department’s “substance person” on Lebanon affairs.
Abedin later promised to contact the “substance person” about the request.
“This is
very important,” Band replied, noting the urgency of the request.
Chagoury has
donated $1 to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. His company also pledged $1
billion to the Clinton Global Initiative in 2009, the same year the Clinton
Global Initiative awarded the Chagoury Group its annual prize for “sustainable
development.”
In July
2004, police lay in wait at an airfield in the far northeastern corner of
Nigeria. Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese businessman and one-time adviser to the
late dictator Sani Abacha, was set to touch down in his private jet. Nuhu
Ribadu, then the country's top anti-corruption prosecutor, says that Chagoury
was a kingpin in the corruption that defined Abacha's regime.
"You
couldn't investigate corruption without looking at Chagoury," Ribadu tells
me in a recent interview in California.
Six years
after Abacha's death, Ribadu's officers stood ready to take Chagoury down.
Ribadu says that Chagoury made it possible for Abacha to steal billions of
dollars and lined his own pockets in the process. The prosecutor says he
indicted Chagoury and ordered his arrest for relatively minor violations
related to Chagoury's businesses so that he could later bring additional
charges for his activities in the Abacha era.
But, no
sooner had Chagoury's plane hit the ground, than it took off again. Ribadu says
it's likely that an airport official tipped him off, and Ribadu's big catch
slipped away, literally into thin air.
Chagoury was
among the last of the all-powerful middlemen who served the heads of oil-rich
African states, says Philippe Vasset, longtime editor of Africa Energy Intelligence,
one of a series of influential energy industry newsletters. "He [Chagoury]
was the gatekeeper to Abacha's presidency," Vasset says.
In many
African countries, a Western entrepreneur might hand over money to a fixer or
middleman, who would then pass it on to a political leader in exchange for
support for a business venture. In Nigeria, Vasset explains, Chagoury was just
such a figure in the mid-1990s, when Abacha ruled the country and held the key
to much of the country's oil wealth.
Today, Chagoury
is a diplomat representing the tiny island nation of St. Lucia. He is also a
friend of former President Bill Clinton and a generous philanthropist, who,
since the Abacha years, has used his money to establish respectability. He
appeared near the top of the Clinton Foundation donor list in 2008 as a $1
million to $5 million contributor, according to foundation documents. (His name
made the list again in 2009.)
Chagoury's
contribution to the Louvre in Paris some years back was large enough for the
museum to name a gallery for him and his wife. In recent years, he has put up
$10 million for the construction of medical and nursing schools in Lebanon, his
parents' country of origin, that also bear the Chagoury name.
Unlike his
friend, the former president [Clinton], Chagoury conducts his affairs largely
out of public view. He rarely talks to reporters.
Unlike his
friend, the former president, Chagoury conducts his affairs largely out of
public view. He rarely talks to reporters.
But on a
cool day in late 2008, I headed up a gently winding road in Beverly Hills,
where Chagoury's Moorish-style villa sprawls across the top of a steep canyon.
The home once belonged to entertainer Danny Thomas, and Richard Nixon, Raquel
Welch, and Michael Caine have all lived in the neighborhood.
After a
written request for an interview and many follow-up phone calls, Chagoury
invited me to meet him. "We'll see if we can get along," he said.
Chagoury's home is packed with art, antiques, and crystal chandeliers, and
offers a staggering view across West Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean.
As I'm
taking it all in, Chagoury climbs a thickly carpeted, winding staircase to the
living room to greet me. He's a stout man, dressed in a navy blue sport coat
with buttons that strain against a barrel chest. His fingernails are buffed and
manicured, and he has a full head of salt-and-pepper hair.
Almost
immediately, he has a proposal: Do your story, but don't sell your work to a
media outlet. "Do it for me," he says, offering me access and
contacts -- even the chance to write a book. In exchange, I would get cash, and
he would get full control of the product. I politely turn him down, but he
brings up the offer several times during the interview.
"I am
an industrialist," he says in lightly accented, near-perfect English.
"I spend a lot of time with my family. I don't have time to do all that
people say I do."
As we talk,
I learn that much of what Chagoury says about himself is so out of sync with
the public record and what others have told me -- even those who are friendly
toward him -- that it seems he's not just in the market for positive spin, but
for all-out reinvention.
When I bring
up his days in Nigeria, he tells me that he detests his reputation as Abacha's
middleman. "I am not in that business," he says. Rather, he has
worked hard since he was a teenager, building a conglomerate called The
Chagoury Group, which employs 20,000 people in Nigeria in construction, real
estate development, telecommunications, and other sectors.
"I am
an industrialist," he says in lightly accented, near-perfect English.
"I spend a lot of time with my family. I don't have time to do all that
people say I do."
"I have
never bribed anyone," he says, looking me straight in the eye. "I
have never had to make a crooked deal." He is absolutely sure of himself,
even though he has offered me a bribe of sorts just minutes earlier.
As for
Ribadu, the Nigerian investigator who says his officers nearly made that 2004
arrest on corruption charges, Chagoury says, "He's not such hot
stuff." He tells me that Ribadu -- who until 2007 headed the Economic and
Financial Crimes Commission, an agency similar to the FBI -- was an attack-dog
set against the enemies of President Olusegun Obasanjo, who appointed him.
Obasanjo
Olusegun
Obasanjo was elected president of Nigeria in 1999 on an anti-corruption
platform.
Ribadu was
pushed out of his job after Obasanjo left office, and says he was given the
freedom to act independently during his tenure and was ousted because of his
zealous prosecution of high-level officials.
Chagoury,
who turns 64 this month, was born in Lagos and is the eldest of eight children.
He has dual citizenship in Lebanon and the United Kingdom because of his
parents' heritage and because he was born in Nigeria while it was still under
British rule.
His father
came to West Africa in the 1930s from the northern Lebanese town of Miziara.
The elder Chagoury followed what was by then a well-worn migrant trail to
Nigeria, where he traded in textiles and helped his brother in a small trucking
operation.
Chagoury is
part of the Lebanese diaspora, which is by some estimates several times larger
than the population of Lebanon, and includes such influential members as
Mexican businessman Carlos Slim, the world's third richest man, Columbian
entertainer Shakira, and American activist Ralph Nader.
Like their
Palestinian and Jewish neighbors, the Lebanese have scattered about the world,
and Chagoury seems equally at home in Lagos or Beverly Hills. He has also
maintained close ties to his parents' home town of Miziara.
Today,
Miziara survives -- and even thrives -- because of Chagoury and his brothers,
says Gilbert Aoun, who was Lebanon's ambassador to Nigeria during Abacha's
rule. Still, nine months of the year, the mountainous settlement of some 15,000
is a ghost town, Aoun says, because most Miziarans old enough to work are
employed by the Chagourys in Nigeria.
Chagoury
didn't grow up rich, but he says that he always wanted the security and
prestige that money brings. He went into business with his father-in-law, and
later with his brother. The family established several flour mills in Benin and
Nigeria, a construction company in Nigeria, and a club in Lagos.
An
Indispensable Adviser
Chagoury
says he met Abacha by chance on a flight to the Niger Delta city of Port
Harcourt, when the future dictator was a young officer. The two struck up a
friendship, and when Abacha seized power in a 1993 coup, Chagoury became the
general's indispensable adviser.
General
Abacha was an eccentric man and a brutal leader, who consolidated his power by
declaring martial law and jailing political rivals. He kept a menagerie of
exotic animals and rarely removed his sunglasses. The regime drew worldwide
condemnation in 1995, when activist playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other
men who had campaigned against the environmental degradation of the oil-rich
Niger Delta were executed for what most observers say were trumped-up murder
charges.
From his
earliest days in power, Abacha set the tone for an administration that would
become the most corrupt in Nigeria's history. Today, more than a decade after
the dictator's death, investigators from Washington DC to the Nigerian capital
of Abuja are still unraveling the web of shady dealings around Abacha's rule.
Within
months of taking office in 1993, Abacha began to divert money from Nigeria's
central bank to the overseas bank accounts of his family members and
associates, including Chagoury's. A lawsuit brought by the Nigerian government
against Abacha's heirs and associates in the United Kingdom shows that the
dictator fraudulently ordered the bank transfers for national security
purposes.
By the time
of Abacha's death in 1998, those so-called security payments would total $2
billion, but they would represent less than half the funds that
money-laundering investigators around the world estimate that Abacha and his
associates stole from their country.
However,
Abacha found other ways to pad his bank accounts. A $180 million bribery scheme
-- the largest ever discovered as part of a U.S. Justice Department
investigation -- was hatched the first year Abacha was in office.
Halliburton's
Nigerian Bribes
The scheme
began in the early 1990s, when Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), at the time a
subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation, led a joint venture that bid for a
$6 billion contract to build a sprawling liquefied natural gas facility in the
Niger Delta.
The group
won the bid, but not before Abacha had agreed to accept a $40 million bribe
that he would share with other Nigerian officials, according to Department of
Justice court papers. It was the first installment of $180 million in bribes
that KBR would pay, not only to officials of the Abacha regime, but to
officials of the two heads of state who succeeded him.
A few months
before I interviewed Chagoury, former KBR CEO Jack Stanley had pleaded guilty
in a Texas courtroom to charges related to organizing the bribery scheme that
went on for a decade in Nigeria, and to taking millions in kickbacks for
himself. Since then, two more KBR contractors have been indicted, and
Halliburton entered a guilty plea and paid the government a record fine of more
than $500 million.
Chagoury
denies any involvement in the bribery case, but his name surfaces in notes
taken by one of the indictees, William [Wojciech] Chodan [Chaudan].
Chagoury
denies any involvement in the bribery case, but his name surfaces in notes
taken by one of the indictees, Chodan, who kept detailed records of so-called
cultural meetings, where bribes were discussed.
One entry
reads, "$250 ... to IPCO via Chagoury."
When I ask
Chagoury about these records, he doesn't dispute that the note refers to a sum
of $250 million, but he argues that it refers to a contract, which, he says,
was legitimately awarded to one of his companies, IPCO Nigeria Limited, for
construction related to the liquefied natural gas plant.
Chagoury has
not been named by the Department of Justice or charged with any crime related
to the KBR affair.
His work as
an intermediary for Abacha went beyond business affairs. He was also deeply involved
in diplomacy, even though he held no official government post. In the
mid-1990s, when Nigeria came under increasing pressure from Washington to hold
elections, Chagoury gained access to high-level U.S. emissaries like Jesse
Jackson and Bill Richardson as well as to a number of senior State Department
officials, according to Donald McHenry, a former American ambassador to the
United Nations, who worked in U.S.-Nigeria diplomacy at the time.
The Clinton
Connections
Chagoury,
along with his wife and three of his children, were guests at a the Clinton's
White House holiday dinner shortly after Chagoury gave nearly half a million
dollars to a voter registration committee, Vote Now '96, according to a report
in The Washington Post. (Chagoury would have been barred from donating directly
to the Clinton campaign because he is not a U.S. citizen.) Since then, Chagoury
and Clinton have traveled together and seen each other socially.
"Every
one knows I'm friends with the Clintons," Chagoury says.
As Abacha's
health began to fail in the late 1990s, Chagoury made major efforts to prop up
the dictator. A State Department memo obtained under the Freedom of Information
Act, entitled "The Health Watch on the Head of State Continues,"
shows that Chagoury appeared to have brought medical specialists and
sophisticated medical equipment to the presidential residence in Abuja, while
publicly downplaying the seriousness of Abacha's condition.
When Abacha
died in June 1998, a second State Department memo notes that Chagoury placed an
in-flight call from his private plane to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria to report
that he was in touch with Nigeria's Provisional Ruling Council, which would be
meeting later that day to discuss a successor to Abacha. In the phone call, Chagoury
asked what governmental structure would be acceptable to U.S. officials,
according to the memo.
Immediately
after Abacha's death, Ribadu, then a young police investigator, says he began
looking into the dictator's financial affairs. "It wasn't uncommon for
Nigerian leaders to put money elsewhere," Ribadu says. "But the
magnitude was beyond anybody's comprehension."
Nuhu Ribadu
Nigeria's
former chief prosecutor, Nuhu Ribadu, who unsuccessfully tried to indict and
arrest Chagoury in 2004.
The money --
estimated at more than $4 billion -- was stashed in Switzerland, Luxembourg,
Liechtenstein, and the Isle of Jersey in the names of dozens of individuals and
companies. Ribadu argues that it was Chagoury who vouched for Abacha's sons at
banks where the source of their assets might otherwise have been questioned.
Indeed,
Chagoury's Swiss attorney, Luc Argand, told me that his client served as a
reference for Abacha's sons at Credit Suisse. The Nigerian government
eventually requested help from law enforcement around the world in tracking the
stolen assets. In 2000, Chagoury was convicted in Geneva, Switzerland, of
laundering money and aiding a criminal organization in connection with the
billions of dollars stolen from Nigeria during the Abacha years.
Argand has
insisted that Chagoury used the money for diplomatic missions on behalf of
Abacha. Asked if he had records to substantiate that claim, Argand said he
couldn't produce any. He also conceded that the money was "stolen by
Abacha, and had to be returned."
However,
Argand says that Chagoury had already decided on his own to return it. In the
end, he says, his client agreed to a plea deal: Chagoury would pay a fine of a
million Swiss francs and hand over $66 million to the Nigerian government.
Swiss authorities promised to expunge the conviction after two years, which
they have done.
In 1999,
Chagoury won immunity from prosecution in a separate looted-assets case in
Nigeria by agreeing to return money that he held in Swiss bank accounts. The
precise amount that Chagoury returned is unclear.
Meanwhile,
the hunt for Nigeria's stolen treasure continues. A panel appointed by
Nigeria's current president, Umaru Yar'Adua, is currently investigating which
Nigerian officials took bribes in the Halliburton case and has reportedly
requested U.S. Department of Justice cooperation in the probe. However, some
Nigeria watchers, including Ribadu, doubt the seriousness of the inquiry.
The Clinton
Foundation did not respond to emailed questions and repeated phone calls about
the nature of Bill and Hillary Clinton's relationship with Chagoury.
While the
Nigerian government struggles to recoup the losses it suffered under Abacha,
Chagoury has prospered and continued to win acceptance from influential people
around the world.
Last year,
he was knighted by the Catholic Church and inducted into the Order of St.
Gregory the Great, an honor bestowed upon those who serve the church, including
many who are big donors to the institution. Bob Hope, Ricardo Montalban, and
Rupert Murdoch are among past recipients.
The Clinton
Foundation did not respond to emailed questions and repeated phone calls about
the nature of Bill and Hillary Clinton's relationship with Chagoury. Former
Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe, who, according to The Washington
Post, was a sponsor of Chagoury's invitation to the White House in 1996, also
failed to return phone calls. A spokesman for former Clinton political advisor
James Carville, also a Chagoury acquaintance, said that Carville could not
comment on the relationship.
And Chagoury
hasn't stopped earning his fortune. Knowledgeable sources say that Chagoury
controls South Atlantic Petroleum, a company that was awarded a choice oil
exploration license before Abacha's death. Three years ago, the company sold a
portion of its government-granted concession to the Chinese oil company, China
National Offshore Oil Corporation, for $2.7 billion.
In our
interview, Chagoury didn't deny that he profited from the deal, but he said
rumors that former President Clinton helped make the deal happen were untrue.
Chagoury is
unfazed by the crackdown by the U.S. Justice Department on foreign bribery,
exemplified by the Halliburton case, and waves off the recent spate of
prosecutions like an elder statesman: "You have lobbyists; we have
agents," he says.
"You
are never going to stop corruption," because it's favoritism, and that's
human nature, which laws won't change, he tells me.
It's no
wonder he is so confident. He is now free to come and go in Nigeria, while his
nemesis, corruption hunter Nuhu Ribadu, left the country last year, he says,
after an attempt on his life.
Robin
Urevich is a reporter in Monterey County, California. Her work has appeared on
NPR, Marketplace, NPR affiliates KQED and KPCC, the San Francisco Chronicle,
and the Las Vegas Sun. She is a graduate of the University of California
Berkeley School of Journalism.
share your reactions
REACTIONS
Jide
Babalola - Abuja, Nigeria
This is an
absolutely wonderful insight into what happens in "our world" here in
Nigeria. Chagoury is still a business partner of few of the most highly
influential Nigerian elites.
George
Chidiebere Iheanacho - Lagos, Nigeria
This article
is superb and represents every bit of investigative journalism. Nigeria has
been raped thorough by all manner of pretenders and greedy capitalists at the
long run the Nigerians people bear the brunt of this greedy and selfish
capitalism.I hope a day will come when very naria and kobo from Nigeria will be
accounted for.Shame to our past and present leaders, really they have betrayed
the good will of Nigerians and vision of our heroes past as a result of corrupt
enrichment.
GENEVA,
SWITZERLAND
Deep and
insightful commentary and report. Sad though that Bill Clinton's name surfaced
on this piece, but we need him (Bill Clinton) to get Gilbert arrested. The
likes of Gilbert and his cronies are still on ground in Africa, milking,
thieving, robbing and corrupting the entire fabric of the continent. Nigeria is
a place where they thrive most due to easy cash from Oil and Gas. This fight
will go two ways. Physical and Spiritual. And I can assure you none of them
will go unpunished. Well done for this well researched information.
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