Hillary Clinton named in ‘abusive’ Eko Atlantic deal

Hillary Clinton, first elected female presidential candidate of the US Democratic Party, has been named in an “improper and abuse of office deal” involving the Eko Atlantic city, Lagos.

According to Fox News, Clinton, shortly after she left the Obama administration, moved the state department to quietly “taking steps to purchase real estate in Nigeria from a firm whose parent company is owned by a major donor to the Clinton Foundation”.

The news agency alleges that on March 20, 2013, William Franklin, an “international realty specialist” at the State Department, emailed Mary E. Davis, an American diplomat stationed in Africa, instructing her to “put on Post letterhead” an “expression of interest” by the department in purchasing property at Eko Atlantic.

Franklin further instructed that the signed letter was to be “delivered to Ronald Chagoury”.

The draft letter, also obtained by Fox News, was undated and addressed to Chagoury care of his firm South Energyx Nigeria Limited, a subsidiary of the larger Chagoury Group that is spearheading the Eko Atlantic real estate venture.

The State Department letter sought, among other things, to confirm that the department could proceed with “acquisition of the real property…[at] the asking price of $1,250 per square meter”.

Overtures to real estate developers from state department officials scouting locations for embassies, consulates and other diplomatic facilities would ordinarily not arouse interest.

But in this case, the budding transaction – never completed, the department now says – raised eyebrows because Ronald Chagoury is the brother and business partner, in the Chagoury Group, of Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-born businessman whom federal records show has donated between $1 and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Indeed, Gilbert Chagoury’s friendship with the Clintons can be traced back to the Clinton presidency.

In the mid-1990s, Chagoury donated nearly $500,000 to a voter-registration drive designed to help Democratic candidates, attended a White House dinner for premium donors, and met with high-ranking officials in the Clinton White House – including Susan Rice, now President Obama’s national security adviser – who were shaping US policy toward Nigeria.

The State Department’s outreach to the Chagoury family, looking to buy property from the brothers, came less than a month after former President Clinton himself toured the Eko Atlantic project – for the second time.

Clinton toured the Eko Atlantic site for the second time on February 21, 2013 – twenty days after his wife left the State Department – to celebrate the Chagourys’ reclamation of 5 million square meters of land, a critical juncture in the project.

Clinton was photographed conferring with Gilbert Chagoury and Jeffrey Hawkins, the consul general for the State Department in Nigeria.

Twenty-seven days later, when William Franklin would order aides to begin exploring the acquisition of land from South Energyx, the Chagoury-owned company, Hawkins would be one of four State Department officials copied on Franklin’s email.

“A month after Bill Clinton visits a Gilbert and Ronald Chagoury-run land project in Nigeria, the U.S. State Department wants to buy the same land,” said David Bossie, president of Citizens United, the conservative advocacy group whose litigation against the State Department pried loose the Franklin email and accompanying letter.

Citizen’s United has filed a suit against the state department on the deal, which is seen as using state powers to empower the Clinton foundation.