National Post (National Edition)
B.C. businessman caught up in ‘vicious’ U.S. politics
‘I can’t get anything done ... It’s out of control’
VANCOUVER • This seems out of character: Frank Giustra, one of Canada’s wealthiest and most guarded businessmen, is openly seething. Smacking the boardroom table and swearing.
“I can’t deal with this anymore,” snaps the mining and entertainment magnate. To his horror, he’s become hot political fodder south of the border. All because of his close relationship with former U.S. president Bill Clinton, suggestions of influence-peddling through related charities the two men established and a growing scandal ensnaring Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“I’ve spent the last 10 days doing nothing but dealing with media calls. I can’t get anything done,” Giustra says, his voice starting to crack the longer our interview inside his downtown Vancouver office this week continues. “It’s out of control. It’s a f---ing circus.”
A rags-to-riches multi-millionaire who normally shuns publicity, Giustra made his fortune as a stockbroker before “retiring” two decades ago, shy of his 40th birthday. An ugly, Bre-X-style gold mining scandal caused by others was singeing his feathers and creating what he describes as “internal conflict” at Yorkton Securities Inc., the Vancouver-based brokerage he headed.
He quit the business forever and created a film company, Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., which found success in Hollywood.
(He’s mostly out of that, but is still a company director and has a large stake in another film studio, Thunderbird Films.) He eventually formed what might seem an unlikely alliance with the former U.S. president. They come from completely different backgrounds, but have some things in common: A taste for philanthropy, and a knack for finding money.
Giustra insists that neither he nor Bill Clinton has done anything wrong with their charitable endeavours. And indeed, there’s no evidence of any wrongdoing. Not for the first time, they’ve become targets of speculation, what Giustra insists are baseless smear jobs, “vicious and agenda-driven.”
Requested four months ago, our interview was finally scheduled this week, with the controversies still brewing. We were to focus on Giustra’s new interests, including the quality food business. A selfdescribed food “fanatic,” he holds a majority stake in Modern Farmer, a quirky, New York-based farm-totable magazine now in the midst of a management shakeup. The magazine’s founding editor “was a very good editor, but these things need to be looked at as a business,” says Giustra, without offering more details.
He owns an award-winning olive oil company, and he recently bought into a packaged soup company. After many taste tests and product tinkering, a big soup launch is coming soon to Western Canada. Even from chicken stock, he expects nothing but excellence — and profits. “When we sell the soup, I want to [be able to] say, “It’s the best-tasting soup you can buy in a pouch,” declares Giustra.
Philanthropy is another pursuit he’ll discuss happily. Same goes for his songwriting, another borderline obsession. Giustra has his own commercial recording studio and music company. Little known fact: He wrote the lyrics to a children’s lullaby called Little B, which Sarah McLachlan put to music and recorded on her last album.
Inevitably, the discussion returns to his Clinton connection, and the current uproar that’s driving him crazy. Stories from the U.S. “are making me look like a very horrible person,” Giustra complains. “And I’m like, seriously folks? I’m giving away money. There’s a campaign, a political campaign. Anybody with half a brain would know what’s happening.”
His friend’s wife, Hillary Clinton, is hoping to become the next U.S. president. The campaign spinning and mudslinging has gone full-throttle. Clinton’s enemies are out to get her, Giustra suggests, by any means necessary, even if it means casting aspersions about charities that he and former president Clinton created as vehicles to provide affordable medicine and sustainable anti-poverty efforts in developing countries.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign to seize the Democratic party presidential nomination has likely been damaged by accounts published the past few weeks in The New York Times and in a muckraking new book called Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by conservative American pundit Peter Schweizer.
The coverage highlights large donations made over several years to the U.S.-based charity Clinton Foundation, through an affiliated Canadian charity called the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada). Giustra established the latter in 2007, after donating $31.7 million directly to the Clinton Foundation himself.
The Canadian partnership is registered in Canada, where tax receipts are issued to donors, but it’s “run out of the [Clinton] foundation” which ultimately receives the money, says Giustra. Sources behind most of the partnership donations have never been disclosed. That’s par for the course in Canada, where donor lists aren’t required. But gifts to the Canadian partnership have led to doubts about the Clinton family’s pledge of financial transparency and accountability with regard to their foundation. Not for the first time, either; similar concerns were raised in 2008, the last time Hillary Clinton tried running for president.
More nefarious are suggestions that donors might have expected more than just tax relief for their contributions. A political reward or a useful U.S. government decision, for example, during the period Hillary Clinton served as the powerful U.S. Secretary of State, from 2009 to 2013.
In those years, the Canadian partnership forwarded millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. The New York Times reported last month that the Clinton Foundation received four donations, totalling US$2.35 million, from the Vancouver-based chairman of Uranium One Inc., a Canadian mining company with uranium concessions in several countries, including Kazakhstan and the U.S.
Giustra was once a major player and shareholder in Uranium One’s predecessor, UrAsia Energy Ltd., and he’d made deals in Kazakhstan for its plutonium deposits after he and Clinton attended a dinner for “50 to 100” people in that country, hosted by its president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. But Giustra divested from UrAsia in 2007, and he insists he never received any political favours.
Later, during Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State, Russia’s state-owned atomic energy agency purchased large positions in Uranium One, and became sole owner in 2013, after requisite approvals from various government agencies in North America, including the State Department.
“Whether the donations played any role in the approval of the uranium deal is unknown,” the Times noted in its coverage last week.
Or, as the Vancouver Sun summed up last week, “the basic facts” being reported are “neither damning nor exculpatory.”
Giustra can live with that assessment, however indecisive. But, he adds, “anybody who has any sense of knowledge of how things work in the real world would absolutely tell you, you can’t make a charitable donation and have something change between governments.” He smacks the boardroom table again. “That is insanity. You want to try and bribe somebody? You go and put money in a Swiss bank account if you’re trying to bribe them. You don’t do it by trying to make a charitable donation. That’s ridiculous.”
The interview is ending. Giustra’s handler seems a little annoyed at the time spent on the Clinton controversy. The subject is clearly sick of it, and angry over the damage it is causing his reputation. His philanthropic efforts and have been questioned. Other causes are being overshadowed, even ignored.
“There’s a thing called Sole Food, which I funded, all of it,” Giustra says before leaving the boardroom. “It’s an urban farm business here in Vancouver. They’re creating urban farms in empty parking lots. I put up all the money for it. Half a million dollars.”
He pauses. “Didn’t get much credit for it, but whatever.”
Seriously folks? I’m giving away money