May 12, 2015 – Bill Clinton Gave a Six-Figure Speech to a Controversial Vulture Fund as His Wife Ran for President

“On May 12, 2015, the private equity firm Apollo Global Management announced it was unloading the remainder of its stake in Noranda Aluminum. Apollo had gained control of the Tennessee-based company in a 2007 leveraged buyout and had subsequently followed a familiar playbook in the cutthroat world of corporate takeovers: It saddled Noranda with the debt it had used to buy the company and then extracted large dividends. As Noranda struggled to stay solvent, Apollo eventually cashed out of the firm. In early 2016, the debt-riddled aluminum company declared bankruptcy, shut down its largest smelting plant in Missouri, and laid off hundreds of employees.

That same day in 2015 that Apollo disposed of its stake in Noranda, Bill Clinton pocketed $250,000 for a speech to one of its subsidiaries, Apollo Management Holdings”.

(…) “The Apollo speech came a month after Hillary Clinton—who recently said her husband would be “in charge of revitalizing the economy” in her administration—formally declared her candidacy. Prior to launching her White House bid, Clinton had ditched the profitable speaking circuit. (She earned almost $22 million between April 2013 and March 2015, according to an analysis by CNN.) But the former president continued to deliver lucrative paid speeches until late 2015, banking about $3 million in payments just in the months that his wife had been running for president.”

(…) “Apollo is known as a vulture fund, so named because these types of firms swoop in to buy up distressed companies, in some cases stripping them of their assets and leaving little more than a corporate carcass behind. Founded in 1990, Apollo rose from the ashes of Drexel Burnham Lambert, a major investment bank that collapsed in 1990 due to junk bond pioneer Michael Milken’s illegal trading (for which Milken would receive a 10-year prison sentence, of which he would serve 22 months, and a $600 million fine). When Drexel fell apart, Leon Black, a managing director at the firm, led a group of his co-workers in launching Apollo. Since then, the company’s growth has made Black and his co-founders immensely wealthy. Black is worth about $4.7 billion. Another Apollo co-founder, Joshua Harris, is worth more than $2 billion and in 2011 bought a controlling interest in the Philadelphia 76ers.” (Read more: Mother Jones, 6/01/2016)