Hillary Clinton’s connections to the Panama Papers exposed

  A couple of weeks ago the Panama Papers, which show how wealthy people are allowed to hide some of their assets, were made public. The timing of this release during an election year was quite interesting and seemed to be planned as Hillary Clinton quickly jumped all over the issue saying that the papers showed “outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting.” And not to be outdone Barack Obama called for international tax reform in the wake of the release, while Bernie Sanders used this as an I told you so moment.

  This seemed like a ready-made issue for the Democrats in an election year which is based on a divide and conquer strategy and naturally I was skeptical and immediately thought  these papers were released at this time for political reasons. However we have not heard much about this issue since the initial release of the papers and, if this story is true, we may now know the reason why.

  It turns out that while the former Secretary of State and her husband have not been directly linked to the tax havens for the super rich many of their close associates have been. Here is more:

But it turns out that the Democratic presidential front-runner and her husband have multiple connections with people named in the papers — including staffers and major donors, McClatchy Newspapers revealed Saturday night.

Among those named in the papers as using the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca to set up offshore entities are Gabrielle Fialkoff, who served as Clinton’s finance director during her first campaign for the Senate in New York, according to a report published online at mcclatchydc.com.

Another name from the papers is billionaire Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining magnate and longtime crony of Bill Clinton who has donated $100 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Yet another name from the paper is The Chagoury Group, an international developer based in West Africa that has pledged $1 billion in projects to the Clinton Global Initiative.

Additional names include Chinese billionaire Ng Lap Seng, who was at the center of a Democratic fund-raising scandal during the Clinton administration, and Marc Rich, the notorious international fugitive pardoned by Bill Clinton in his final hours as president in 2001, McClatchy reported.

  All of this, of course, plays right into Bernie Sanders’s hands as he has been claiming that Hillary Clinton is part of the problem and not part of the solution which is probably one of the reasons why the former Secretary of State has seems to have lost interest in this story–that and the fact she has connections to people named in the papers. But maybe I am reading too much into this, after all Hillary Clinton is just an “ordinary person” who was “dead broke” when she and her husband left the White House. 

  Just because her close associates took advantage of the “outrageous tax havens” does not mean she did as well in order to amass a fortune in a relatively short period of time, right? This is all just a coincidence and after all at this point what difference does it make, there is not even a smidgen of corruption here…

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium