Not impressed by the company the man keeps...



http://www.bnamericas.com/ten/articulo.jsp?idioma=I&documento=30
WHO IS FRANK GIUSTRA?

Excerpt:
"But why did Giustra join the growing community of businessmen and multi-billionaires with a concern for philanthropy? Lawton [Frank's wife] remembers a conversation with her husband five years ago. At that time, Lawton was deepening her understanding of the needs of people and families living with AIDS in Africa. So she urged Giustra to use his resources and contacts to generate a change in the way the mining and natural resources businesses operated around the world. “Frank and I realized that not only were we financially privileged people, but that we were very well connected,” she says.

And of these connections, Clinton has perhaps been the most important. It’s well known in the circles in which Giustra moves that he has made his private jet available to the ex president and that he has accompanied Clinton all around the world, meeting with political and business leaders in South America, Asia and Africa in the last two years. “All of my chips, almost, are on Bill Clinton,” Giustra said recently in an interview with the New Yorker. “He’s a brand, a worldwide brand, and he can do things and ask for things that no one else can.”

For now, CGSGI [Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative] is moving full steam ahead, collecting funds from private mining companies that seek to explore for – and EXPLOIT – resources in developing countries. And as for the private plans of the filmmaking Canadian miner, nobody knows. The only certainty is that, this year, Frank Giustra has committed to give half of his future earnings to CGSGI’s philanthropic projects." (Emphasis mine.)


After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton
Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=0

"Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.

Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges."
more at the above link...