“The inner workings of a mysterious off-the-books arm of the Clinton Foundation were partially revealed in the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
The little-known Haiti Development Fund, an LLC incorporated in Delaware in August 2010, was created by the Clinton Foundation with an initial endowment of $20 million from shady Canadian mining mogul Frank Giustra and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.
The Fund was supposed to supply desperately needed seed money to Haitian entrepreneurs after an earthquake devastated the country in January 2010.
But The Post found only one project that it funded with a fraction of the start-up cash.
Jean-Marc Villain (Credit: New York Post)
Since the Fund is incorporated as a private entity and not a non-profit, it is not subject to the same disclosure rules as a public charity.
And the Clinton Foundation never disclosed the Fund as a “related entity” on its tax filings as required by IRS rules. It was only after the Clinton Foundation, under mounting scrutiny and media pressure, “voluntarily” decided to refile five years’ worth of tax returns in 2015 that the Fund appears on the forms.
The for-profit Fund was managed by Jean-Marc Villain, who was going through bankruptcy in 2010 when he was working for the Clinton Foundation. The non-profit paid him an annual salary of $100,000 to oversee the Fund, according to pay records attached to the Podesta emails.
The Florida Elections Commission found that Villain also had violated state laws in 2001 when he did not file donation reports for the Haitian-American Political Caucus, a political committee where he was listed as treasurer.
“This cries out for an audit or an investigation,” said Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center a Virginia-based watchdog group. “Its director was in bankruptcy and there’s almost nothing in the public record showing what happened to the millions of dollars it supposedly was going to use to help poor Haitians.” (Read more: The New York Post, 11/05/2016) (Archive)