America
Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign faces new questions
By
Arun KumarWashington, April 28
As Hillary Clinton's
presidential campaign comes under the media scanner, charges are flying
thick and fast -- from donations to the Clinton Foundation to claims
that it distributed to AIDS patients useless drugs made by an Indian
company.
Last week, a New York Times report suggested that cash
flowed to the family charity amid a deal with Russian atomic energy
agency Rosatom over control of one-fifth of all uranium production
capacity in the US, when she was secretary of state.
On Sunday,
the family philanthropy founded by her husband and former president Bill
Clinton in 2001, while denying any wrongdoing on her part, admitted
that it made mistakes in how it disclosed its foreign donors.
Even
as it claimed that its "donor disclosure and foreign government
contributor policy is stronger than ever", acting CEO Maura Pally said
in a blog post: "So yes, we made mistakes, as many organizations of our
size do."
"But we are acting quickly to remedy them, and have
taken steps to ensure they don't happen in the future," she said
defending the work of the organisation.
But conservative news
site WorldNetDaily (WND) on Monday claimed the Clinton Health Aids
Initiative (CHAI) worked closely with Indian pharmaceutical company
Ranbaxy to distribute "drastically substandard" generic anti-retroviral
drugs to Third World countries.
The Clintons appear to have
personally profited from an airline-ticket levy programme run by the UN
group UNITAID that used the Clintons' international prestige to
"leverage" manufacturers of prescription quality drugs and health-care
products and sell them to developing countries at a discount price, it
said.
Citing a Wall Street analyst, WND said Ira Magaziner, the
chief executive officer and vice chairman of CHAI, approached Ranbaxy in
2002 to negotiate a deal.
CHAI proposed to Ranbaxy that they
could put the developing countries together to form a sort of 'buying
club' that could "ramp up economies of scale and lower cost", it said
citing a 2013 book "AIDS Drugs for All".
Meanwhile, Forbes
magazine on Monday reported that approximately 62 percent of the former
secretary of state's Twitter "followers are potentially either bogus or
inactive".
By this measure, of her nearly 3.4 million followers, 2.1 million likely never view her tweets, it said.
Interestingly,
Clinton also follows the fewest people, has issued the fewest number of
tweets and was the last politician of the potential 2016 field to join
Twitter, Forbes said.
Meanwhile, according to a report in the
Washington Post on Monday, two leading charity watchdogs have split in
their assessments of the Clinton Foundation's spending practices.
In
a new rating published on Monday, the American Institute of
Philanthropy's Charity Watch gave the foundation an "A" rating for
financial performance.
But a second group, Charity Navigator,
citing potential issues that could concern donors placed the foundation
on a "watch list".
Clinton Foundation's acting CEO Pally said on
Sunday that since Hillary Clinton "decided to run for president, we have
committed to disclosing all of our donors on a quarterly basis".
In
addition, the foundation "will only accept funding from a handful of
governments, many of whom the Foundation receives multi-year grants
from, to continue the work they have long partnered on".
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])