by Jim Lobe

Eli has a new blog post on The Nation’s website today that provides additional details about the curious — one is tempted to say incestuous — relationship between the staff of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the corporate interests of billionaire gold and silver investor, Thomas Kaplan. [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Jim Lobe

Eli has a new blog post on The Nation’s website today that provides additional details about the curious — one is tempted to say incestuous — relationship between the staff of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the corporate interests of billionaire gold and silver investor, Thomas Kaplan. It also provides more details about the relationship between UANI and Harvard’s Belfer Center, a major beneficiary of Kaplan’s largesse, which hired UANI’s president, Gary Samore, shortly after he stepped down as a top proliferation adviser to Obama in 2012 (some prominent faculty members also serve on the group’s advisory board). We excerpted Eli’s original Salon piece on UANI’s ties to Kaplan last Friday.

Eli’s latest is based on a recent filing by the plaintiff, Greek shipowner Victor Restis, in his pending defamation case against UANI. It adds new layers of intrigue to the alleged connections between UANI and Kaplan:

[Kaplan] got his start with help from the family of Leon Recanati, a Greek-Israeli entrepreneur whose family owns and still operates Overseas Shipholding Group (“OSG”), a rival shipping company to Enterprises Shipping and Trading. See Exs. 4, 5. OSG operates oil tankers that compete directly with Mr. Restis’ tanker company, Golden Energy Maritime Corp., whose initial public offering had to be abandoned in 2013 when Defendants launched their defamation campaign that is at the heart of this litigation. See Am. Compl. ¶ 97. OSG would stand to profit if Mr. Restis and his companies were no longer able to operate. Kaplan married Leon Recanati’s daughter Dafna Recanati and was introduced to Israeli investor Avi Tiomkin, by Dafna Recanati’s mother.

If this allegation is true — that Kaplan and/or the Recanati family stood to gain a competitive advantage by publicly charging (through UANI) that Restis and his companies were violating sanctions against Iran — then UANI’s failure to publicly disclose any and all of its ties to Kaplan would obviously constitute a serious ethical breach.

(This is not the only example of billionaire financiers allegedly trying to benefit from Iranophobia. As Charles Davis wrote for IPS a year ago, when the fight between Argentina and Paul Singer and other hold-out, or “vulture” bondholders of the country’s debt was getting relatively little media notice, Singer and his fellow-holdouts founded the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), which has led a lavishly funded public relations and lobbying campaign against the Kirchner government, including a host of full-page ads in national and Capitol Hill newspapers, at least two of which assailed Argentina’s ties to Iran and suggested that Kirchner was engaged in a cover-up of Tehran’s alleged — and highly doubtful — role in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. One even showed a photo of Kirchner alongside then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the headline, “A Pact with the Devil?” Singer, who has given millions of dollars to the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), stands to make tens of million dollars of dollars in profit if he and his other hedge-fund holdouts prevail in the case.)

In addition to the connections between Kaplan and UANI, which Eli had previously documented in his Salon article, the plaintiff’s filing alleges that UANI operates out of offices at Rockefeller Center. Those offices are provided rent-free by Continental Properties, whose managing director, Mark Fisch, co-funds an NYU fellowship with Kaplan, and whose staff member, Kim Hillman, has served as an UANI director. The filing also notes that UANI’s CEO, Mark Wallace, serves not only as CEO of Kaplan’s Tigris Financial Group as Eli reported last week, but also as an officer and/or director of at least five other Kaplan enterprises, as well. It concludes:

Wallace has not drawn a salary from UANI since 2009, so Wallace appears to be getting his financial benefit indirectly through UANI supporter Kaplan.

Read the rest of Eli’s piece here.

by Jim Lobe

A week after the now-notorious “Adelson Primary” at the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) convention in Las Vegas, the Washington Post ran the first of what it called a series of profiles of a “handful of wealthy donors” who are likely to give a ton of money — many [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Jim Lobe

A week after the now-notorious “Adelson Primary” at the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) convention in Las Vegas, the Washington Post ran the first of what it called a series of profiles of a “handful of wealthy donors” who are likely to give a ton of money — many tons, now that the Supreme Court has opened the floodgates of campaign cash in the McCutcheon v. FEC case — to political candidates in the current and 2016 election cycles. It chose hedge fund supremo Paul Singer as its first subject, a major GOP funder.

Actually, the Post ran two versions of the profile — one longer piece on its blog and a second, somewhat shorter piece printed in the newspaper. The blog post is more comprehensive. While it focuses primarily on Singer’s support — and substantial contributions to campaigns — for gay marriage around the country, it also mentions other causes that have benefited from his largesse, including his opposition to any form of financial regulation and Israel about which it notes only:

Like fellow Republican donor Sheldon Adelson, Singer is staunchly pro-Israel. He is on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which held its spring meeting last weekend. He was a member of a large American delegation that went to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary in 2008.

The print version of the profile, in contrast, focused almost exclusively on Singer’s LGBT rights advocacy; indeed, neither the word “Israel,” nor the phrase “Republican Jewish Coalition,” nor the name “Sheldon Adelson” appear in the more than 1,000-word piece. The only hint in the article — which is likely to be more influential in forming opinions about Singer’s philanthropy within the Beltway than the blog post — that he has any interest in Israel at all is found in the last paragraph in which it is noted that Singer sits on the board of the “conservative” [!!??] Commentary magazine. But then you’d have to know that Commentary is a hard-line neoconservative journal obsessed with Israel to figure out that Singer takes an interest in matters Middle Eastern.

In a blog post published Monday by The Nation, LobeLog co-founder and contributor Eli Clifton (who now lives in New York and thus doesn’t have ready access to the Washington Post print edition) noted appropriately that the Post’s blog profile had skimped over Singer’s Israel-related philanthropy, notably his generosity to the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), to which he contributed $3.6 million between 2008 and 2011 and may have provided yet more since, albeit not through his family’s foundation. According to tax forms compiled by Eli, between 2009 and 2012, Singer also contributed about $2.3 million to the American Enterprise Institute which, of course, led the charge to war in Iraq and remains highly hawkish on Iran, although those contributions may have had as much or more to do with AEI’s laissez-faire economic theology as with its Israel advocacy. It’s safe to say that his current memberships on the board of both the RJC and Commentary – both staunchly Likudist in orientation — belie some substantial financial support, as does his previous service on the board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) whose executive director, Mike Makovsky, yesterday co-authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal urging the Obama administration to transfer some B-52s and bunker-busting Massive Ordnance Penetrators to Israel ASAP for possible use against Iran. In the past, Singer’s family foundation has also contributed to Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy and the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) — organizations which he may still be supporting, albeit not through his foundation, which is required by the IRS to publicly disclose its giving.

In other words, there is reason to believe that Singer’s Israel-related giving — it seems most, if not all of which, has been provided to hard-line neoconservative, even Islamophobic organizations — he told the New York Times in 2007 that “America finds itself at an early stage of a drawn-out existential struggle with radical strains of pan-national Islamists” — certainly rivals, if not exceeds, his entirely laudable campaign on behalf of gay rights.

One thing Eli left out of his Nation post was Singer’s role as kind of the ultimate “vulture capitalist.” As noted in this Right Web profile quoting Greg Palast:

Singer’s modus operandi is to find some forgotten tiny debt owed by a very poor nation. …He waits for the United States and European taxpayers to forgive the poor nations’ debts, then waits a bit longer for offers of food aid, medicine and investment loans. Then Singer pounces, legally grabbing at every resource and all the money going to the desperate country. Trade stops, funds freeze, and an entire economy is effectively held hostage. Singer then demands aid-giving nations to pay monstrous ransoms to let trade resume.

In one case he demanded $400 million from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for a debt he had acquired for less than $10 million; in another he secured $58 million from the Peruvian government in exchange for letting President Alberto Fujimori flee the country in a private plane Singer had seized against payment of the debt.

More recently, his efforts to capitalize on Argentina’s debt (see here and here for IPS’ coverage) — which was touched on very briefly by the Post’s blog profile — have included the creation of an organization, the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), that has taken out full-page ads in Capitol Hill newspapers linking the government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner to Iran and an alleged cover-up of the highly questionable Iranian role in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, as well as the enlistment of FDD, AEI, and staunchly pro-Israel lawmakers, such as Sen. Mark Kirk and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who have benefited from his campaign contributions, in his cause. Singer’s case has been opposed by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and a host of humanitarian and charitable organizations concerned that, if he succeeds at the U.S. Supreme Court, efforts to relieve poor countries of unsustainable debt may be set back by a more than a decade.

So, while Singer’s support for LGBT rights is certainly an interesting and newsworthy topic for the Post’s profile of this major Republican donor — after all, it is a kind of man-bites-dog story — it seems pretty irresponsible to completely ignore, as the Post did in its print version, these other dimensions of Singer’s political philanthropy, particularly given the chronological proximity to the “Adelson Primary.”

by Eli Clifton

Washington’s premiere hawkish think tank is funded by a small handful of Republican mega donors, according to a just-published tax filing. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which employs some of the most consistent advocates of crippling sanctions and hyping threats of military action against Iran, receives [...]]]> via LobeLog

by Eli Clifton

Washington’s premiere hawkish think tank is funded by a small handful of Republican mega donors, according to a just-published tax filing. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which employs some of the most consistent advocates of crippling sanctions and hyping threats of military action against Iran, receives the majority of its funding from Home Depot funder Bernard Marcus, hedge funder Paul Singer and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

FDD’s President Clifford May tells me his organization has “both Republicans and Democrats among its donors and we are proud of our work with policymakers on both sides of the aisle.”

That might be true. But the fact remains that as of 2011, the FDD has been highly dependent on some of the Republican party’s most committed donors.

My full write up on the FDD’s hyper-partisan underwriters can be read at Salon.com. The FDD’s 2011 “Schedule A”, which shows the organization’s largest donors from 2008 to 2011, can be viewed below.