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Clinton donor back on radar
January 16, 2010
It was an unfortunate look for Hillary Clinton this week that about 12 hours
after vowing to be the US secretary of state who always shows up in Asia,
unlike her predecessor Condoleezza Rice, she pulled out of her trip out this
way.
Whether it was essential for her to be back to help with the rescue and
relief effort in Haiti is debatable. Barack Obama was taking command, a US
Navy carrier group was on the way, and the US military's Southern Command
was swinging into action.
We'll see what she contributes. Meanwhile it looks like she is still running
for president, anxious not to be compared with George Bush and his
indifference to Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans.
The postponed ministerial talks in Canberra don't matter much, but the
planned visits to Papua New Guinea and New Zealand were important: PNG needs
attention, and Washington needs to stop snubbing New Zealand.
A year into the Obama Administration, the choice of Clinton as foreign
minister must still give rise to misgivings at the White House. By strange
coincidence, the locus of most concern is Jakarta, Obama's childhood home
for several years. Jakarta should signal trouble for Clinton and her
husband, the former president Bill, but they can't seem to help being drawn
back to it.
Devotees of Washington politics will recall the huge campaign funding
scandal that broke out around Bill's re-election in 1996. An Indonesian
tycoon, James Riady, was revealed to have funnelled money to Bill and other
Democrats by getting his Lippo Group to reimburse donors operating as
fronts, to avoid restrictions on foreign political donations. There were
conspiracy theories that the Chinese communists were behind the ethnic
Chinese Indonesian.
In 2001, Riady pleaded guilty to ''conspiracy to defraud the United States''
through illegal contributions; he and Lippo were fined $US8.6 million, a
record penalty for campaign finance violations.
Throughout the George Bush presidency, Riady did not get a visa for travel
to the US. It was generally assumed that, having been convicted of fraud, he
was covered by the immigration rule barring entry of foreign citizens guilty
of crimes involving ''moral turpitude''.
Then last May, three months after Hillary became Secretary of State, Riady
was given a six-month multiple entry visa by the US embassy in Jakarta.
The Washington Post says he used the visa twice last year, to attend
graduations of his children and educational institutions including the
Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas, whose president, Rex Horne, just
happens to be the former pastor of the Clintons' church in Little Rock.
The Riady connection with Arkansas and the Clintons goes back to 1978 when
his father, Mochtar Riady, who was connected with the then Indonesian
president Soeharto's top ethnic Chinese business friend, Liem Sioe Liong,
bought into a small bank and James was installed as a director.
The connection has been nurtured as the Clintons rose from state to national
political success.
In 2004 Ouachita awarded James Riady an honorary doctorate, not unconnected
to his funding of scholarships at the university. Riady likes these
doctorates: he got one from La Trobe University in Melbourne in 2007, after
donating $800,000.
When The Washington Post broke the story of his apparent rehabilitation from
moral turpitude two weeks ago, it quoted an unnamed ''senior State
Department official'' as saying Hillary Clinton had no knowledge of the
decision to let Riady enter the US.
The visa was given by the embassy after Riady asked for permission to travel
to family graduation ceremonies and he was granted entry for a ''very narrow
purpose''.
The US ambassador in Jakarta, Cameron Hume, has been given a lot of space in
one of Riady's newspapers, the Jakarta Globe, and no doubt he is happy about
that. But it is still strange that an envoy would take such a decision on
his own, especially one that was bound to bring down a lot of political
trouble on his boss's head, as it has now done (Fox News and other
right-wing media have gone ballistic).
As well as turning up in Arkansas, Riady is still buzzing around the
Clintons. He is donating to Bill's charitable foundation and in May he and
Bill will be sharing the stage at a real estate convention in Bali.
But maybe James Riady, 52, is a nicer character now than he was in 1996?
Unfortunately, a lot of controversy still swirls around the tycoon and his
Lippo Group. Along with his conspicuous Christianity, there has been a
series of vindictive campaigns against business rivals and estranged
partners that have brought accusations of corruption of Indonesian officials
to help his causes.
The targets have included the Malaysian tycoon T. Ananda Krishnan. After a
dispute about a pay-TV partnership with Riady, he found that several of his
top executives in Jakarta were subject to spurious police cases and pursued
through Interpol when they fled arrest.
A former Lippo Group executive, Bobby Sindoro, was jailed last February for
attempting to bribe an anti-trust official to secure a favourable ruling in
a case against Ananda's company. Lippo said Sindoro had already left his job
and was acting on his own when the bribe was offered - if so, a strange
thing to do with half a billion rupiah ($59,000) of his own money.
The French supermarket chain Carrefour, in rivalry with Riady's Matahari
chain, has also been hit with anti-trust action and was blocked by a court
decision last month from a local takeover (it is appealing the decision). It
is said to see Riady's hand behind a lot of its recent troubles in
Indonesia.
Other former business associates, officials and journalists who rubbed Riady
the wrong way have reported sustained hostile press campaigns, sudden career
obstacles and legal problems, with Indonesian police officers and a network
of evangelical Christians acting against them.
Now other Indonesians barred from the US, including army generals suspected
of human rights abuses, are asking why they can't get US visas too. Why do
the Clintons need this guy? Why, Obama may be asking, does he need Hillary?
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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