Gimme Shelter (From the Tax Man) Disappearing Money and Opportunistic Candidates

This article orginally appeared in TomDispatch. The latest Panama Papers May 9th disclosures underscore the broad and ongoing global connections between big banks and tax havens. A swath of politicians on both sides of the aisle remain enablers and users...

There’s a pile of money hiding offshore. It’s true that jobs are also leaving the United States because American companies find it convenient to cut labor costs by moving manufacturing abroad, the economic issue you’re hearing most about in this election season. But the stunning amount of money that continues to flow across American borders (and those of other countries), and eventually disappears into the pockets of the corporate and political elite, ultimately causes even more damage to our finances and our lives.

While the two leading candidates for the presidency, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, have indeed suggested cosmetic fixes for a situation that only grows more extreme with the passage of time, they have themselves taken advantage of numerous tax “efficiency” strategies that make money evaporate. Of course, you shouldn’t doubt for a second that they’ll change their ways once in the Oval Office.

As with so much in our American heritage, there’s a history to the “offshore” world, too. Finding places to shield money from tax collection first became commonplace among upper-crust industrialists, bankers, and even public servants back in the 1920s. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, a millionaire mogul who served presidents Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover (and had a knack for cutting taxes on the wealthy), left office under mounting congressional probes into his tax evasion strategies.

Fast-forward about a century and tax dodging has been woven into the fabric of the lives of the affluent and corporate worldwide in an extraordinary way. According to an April 2016 Oxfam report, the top 50 U.S. companies are hoarding more than $1.4 trillion in cash offshore.

What’s more, for every dollar that these firms spent lobbying Congress for “favorable” tax treatment (a collective total of $2.6 billion between 2008 and 2014), they received $130 dollars in tax breaks and $4,000 in subsidies from the U.S. government. These companies, including Pfizer, Goldman Sachs, Dow Chemical, Chevron, Walmart, IBM, and Procter & Gamble, created “an opaque and secretive network” of more than 1,600 company subsidiaries located in tax havens that they decided to disclose. (Because of the weak reporting requirements of the Securities and Exchange Commission, there could be thousands more.) According to a March 3rd report from the Citizens for Tax Justice, the Fortune 500 companies are now saving $695 billion in federal income taxes on a total of $2.4 trillion in offshore holdings.

Americans can’t afford to ignore such tax games, since we’re the ones who, in effect, wind up paying the taxes these firms don’t. For government policymakers, such tax evasion is a grim matter of attrition, since the U.S. (and other countries) plunge ever deeper into debt thanks to such antics and then find themselves cutting services or raising taxes on us to cover the gap between the money they’re losing and the taxes they’re collecting. 

Not only are such firms unpatriotic, they are parasitic and while they’re at it, they use similar techniques -- let’s not call it theft (though it is) -- to avoid tax payments in the poorest places on Earth. As Oxfam reports, “the biggest burden” of tax havens “falls on the poorest people.” In the process, they only increase already oppressive levels of inequality globally.

Tax “secrecy” specialists -- people working in the money-hiding field -- help rich individuals, multinational corporations, political leaders, terrorists, and organized crime groups divert cash and capital, sometimes in staggering amounts, from local economies into an obscure, complex, multi-layered global financial network that operates outside any national or international regulatory or tax system. Given this, isn’t it a little surprising that the top candidates for the presidency barely pay lip service to the impact of such hidden money?  What toothless policies they have proposed to deal with the phenomenon will do little or nothing to change it.

The Panama Papers

U.S. trade agreements generally include rosy promises about partnering with regional economies around the world to encourage the flow of goods and services across borders. At the same time, they generally are focused on the obliteration of barriers that in any way restrict money from flowing out of the United States or into the embrace of other nations. The free movement of capital, or financial globalization as it’s called, has been a bedrock Washington policy for a century and, since the 1980s, places like Panama -- a renowned tax haven -- have abetted this process.

A month ago, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released a trove of documents, 2.6 terabytes of them, including “more than 4.8 million emails, 3 million database files, and 2.1 million PDFs.” These were turned over by an undisclosed source (“John Doe”), communicating through encrypted channels to avoid repercussions. Now known as “the Panama Papers,” they reveal how elite multinational companies, the super rich, and government figures have engaged in tax-dodging practices engineered by a single Panama City-based law firm, Mossack Fonseca (MF).

In addition to public officials and billionaires, more than 500 global banks, their subsidiaries and branches, have registered at least 15,600 shell companies there using MF’s services. That word “shell” is descriptively accurate since such “companies” rarely have employees and are commonly no more than a post office box providing a façade through which books can be doctored, taxes dodged, losses concealed, and money-laundering and other criminal actions carried out.  And keep in mind that MF, which acts for approximately 300,000 companies, is only the fourth largest provider of such offshore services globally. 

One mega-bank that used its services extensively was HSBC, which created an astonishing 2,300 shell companies with that law firm’s help. We’ll return to HSBC.

Mossack Fonseca’s official mission, it claims, is “to deliver quality, reliable and comprehensive services to our worldwide clients in the legal, trust, investment consultancy, and digital solution fields.” That’s code for helping select establishment outfits and dubious enterprises to avoid paying taxes on profits, investments, or money made from buying and selling real estate, luxury yachts or planes, oil wells, weapons, or drugs, among other things.

Secrecy is its calling card. Tax havens, or locales amenable to tax dodging, whether in the Caribbean, Central America, Switzerland (still the world’s top location for financial secrecy), or for that matter the state of Delaware, exist to circumvent tax laws. Period. And these operations are so shady that even the functionaries working in the shadows to establish such secret accounts are barely aware of exactly who owns them, where the money came from, or where it’s going. For regulators, prosecutors, and tax collectors, the opacity is far worse.

You don’t necessarily have to be rich or powerful to access the services of such offshore firms and banks, but it helps. Some havens take anyone ready to put up a minimum of $25,000, while others demand staggering sums. Western Samoa, for instance, requires a cool $10 million to get started.

The most alarming aspect of the Panama Papers revelations was not MF’s clientele or even its secretive practices, but that what it does is completely “legal.” Nor was this the first such disclosure. In November 2014, for instance, the “Luxleaks” scandal involving a whole “menagerie of Luxembourg-based tax schemes,” as the Guardian put it, was disclosed by two whistleblowers from the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. (Luxembourg is a major European tax haven.) Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Facebook, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, and Microsoft were on the list of its more than 350 multinational “tax avoiders.”

Avoiding vs. Evading Taxes and Corporate Inversions

Avoiding and evading taxes are technically considered different kinds of acts, the former being legal in the U.S., the latter not. According to the Internal Revenue Service, “Taxpayers have the right to reduce, avoid, or minimize their taxes by legitimate means.” Tax evasion, on the other hand, involves an “act to evade or defeat a tax, or payment of tax” by “deceit, subterfuge, camouflage, concealment, attempts to color or obscure events, or make things seem other than they are.”

The line between the two is obviously thin and vague, but both practices result in the same thing: paying fewer taxes or hiding money.

The subject of tax avoidance and evasion has generally gotten little traction on the campaign trail in election 2016, the exception being corporate “inversions.” These happen when, for example, an American company merges with a foreign one in a tax haven, and so gets a lower tax rate by re-incorporating (filling out some paperwork) there. This, too, is “legal,” although it represents the purest form of corporate tax evasion.  Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the practice began in Panama about 30 years ago.

In 2014, companies with household names like Apple, Microsoft, Pfizer, and General Electric avoided paying a collective $90 billion in taxes through inversion strategies. Apple led that list, holding $181.1 billion offshore.  That’s a lot of iPhone sales.

The Leading Candidates and Hidden Money

Tax havens are, in essence, perfectly “legal” criminal facilities designed to steal money from the rest of us. The two leading candidates in this election season, however, aren’t talking about closing down tax havens for good (which would piss off lots of rich people, banks, drug cartels, and terrorists). They are instead focused on getting companies to voluntarily repatriate, or return, profits made abroad for taxation purposes or on closing tax “loopholes” that allow money to disappear.  Neither, however, offers much detail as to what that means. 

Both do share one thing, however, when it comes to tax havens: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have companies registered at the same address (also “shared” by 285,000 other companies) in Wilmington, Delaware. In other words, they make use of the “Delaware loophole,” which allows for the legal shifting of earnings from elsewhere in the country to the ultimate tax haven state in the U.S.  Neither, as Rupert Neate of the Guardian has written, has been willing to offer any explanation for this. That’s the political beauty of loopholes: closing one is different from eradicating an entire practice but suffices as a promise.

Hillary

Hillary has gone after tax havens before. In 2004, as a New York senator, she vowed to close tax loopholes for “people who create a mailbox, or a drop, or send one person to sit on the beach in some island paradise and claim that it is their offshore headquarters.”  She introduced no bills to do so, however.

She has spoken out against corporate tax inversions, too. She wants Congress to prevent them by imposing what she calls a “commonsense 50%” threshold on them; in other words, as long as a company keeps at least half of its operations in this country, it would be considered a U.S. company for tax purposes, no matter the inversions. She also has favored an “exit tax” to ensure that multinationals pay a “fair” share of U.S. taxes owed on earnings stored overseas. Both of these suggestions would put some modest limits on offshore tax dodging (after the fact), but not come within a country mile of banning it.

On such subjects, she can sound strong indeed at appropriate moments. InFebruary 2016, for instance, she said, “We need to go after a company like Johnson Controls that is trying to avoid paying taxes after all of us bailed it out by pretending to sell itself in a so-called inversion in Europe.” It evidently didn’t matter to her that the same automotive parts company set to merge with Tyco International (based in Ireland to dodge taxes) had donated money to the Clinton Foundation charity as recently as December 2015. (Johnson Controls denied Hillary’s claims that it had received a bailout during the financial crisis.)

Hillary, lest we forget, joined the board of directors of the the Clinton Foundation, the family charity, in 2013. She resigned in April 2015 to run for president. Now, keeping it in the family, her husband, Bill, and her daughter, Chelsea, remain standing members of the board. Spawned from the William J. Clinton Foundation, founded in 1997, the charity has raised $2 billion, has about 2,000 employees (including at times members of Hillary's political team), and boasts an annual budget of $223 million.

Like many gilt-edged couples, Hillary and Bill Clinton have themselves utilized onshore and offshore tax loopholes. In 2010, they used a common tax-dodging technique by placing their multi-million dollar home in Chappaqua, New York, in a “residence trust.” After he left office, Bill spent five years as an “adviser” to billionaire (now-ex-pal) Ron Burkle’s investment fund, Yucaipa Global, which had funds registered in the Cayman Islands and Dubai. That alliance netted Bill at least $15 million.

Hillary’s bedrock thinking on money flowing out of the U.S. and into the offshore world can best be seen in her support for the 2012 U.S.-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement when she was secretary of state. The agreement removed “barriers to U.S. services, including financial services,” which actually simplified the process of squirreling money away in or through Panama by allowing it to flow freely into that country.

The Clinton Foundation inhales donations from people using tax havens (including Panama). Although Hillary denounced Mossack Fonseca’s dealings on cue after the Panama Papers story broke, a number of individuals and multinationals that have contributed to the foundation used MF to establish offshore accounts, according to McClatchy. These include Canadian mining billionaire Frank Giustra who features in the foundation’s $25 million top-tier donor bracket, and two firms tied to Ng Lap Seng, the Chinese billionaire implicated in a major donor scandal involving the Clintons and the Democratic National Committee.

Similarly, in a speech she gave at the New School in July 2015, Hillary highlighted the “criminal behavior” of global bank HSBC. In 2012, the behemoth financial institution agreed to a record $1.92 billion settlement with the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department for enabling drug cartel money laundering and violating U.S. sanctions by conducting transactions for customers in Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Burma. She vowed, “On my watch, it will change.”

Yet, in 2014, the Clinton Foundation accepted between $500,000 and $1 million from that bank. 

The Panama Papers are but one conflicted instance in which Hillary’s stated beliefs, her actions, and the generosity of her friends and acquaintances came together in a contradictory fashion. The evidence suggests that tax-dodgers will, in fact, be able to breathe a sigh of relief if she becomes president.  Her actions are likely to -- if you’ll excuse the expression -- trump her words when it comes to curtailing the behavior of offshore scofflaws in significant ways.  And speaking of Trump...

The Donald

Consider the fact that The Donald won’t even disclose his tax returns. His indignantly delivered explanation is that they are “under audit.” Under the circumstances, don’t hold your breath. Perhaps he doesn’t make nearly as much money as he claims -- or maybe he has an embarrassing tax haven habit. Who knows?

Ironically, Mossack Fonseca’s Panama City headquarters is located a mereseven-minute drive from the Trump International Hotel and Towers in Panama City. (If you’re interested, its website is pitching a bargain on rooms at “15% off our currently available Best Unrestricted Rate.”)  That decadent complex is one of many sketchy enterprises to which Trump lent his name for licensing purposes. According to his (unaudited) personal financial disclosurereport filed with the Federal Election Commission, the deal earned him $5 million. In true Trumpian style, lawsuits and battles surround the endeavor.

Under the tax plan he’s touting in his presidential campaign, U.S. businesses would see a reduction in their maximum tax rate from 35% to 15%. This lower rate (“one of the best in the world”) would, he claims, render corporate inversions unnecessary. The Donald apparently hopes that corporate America will be so eternally grateful to him that they’ll move their money back onshore and pay taxes on it voluntarily (though most of them already don’t pay the top tax rate here anyway).

Trump’s views on a “repatriation tax holiday” that would let companies bring home their overseas stashes on a one-time basis for little or nothing have shifted over the course of his candidacy. Last year, he proposed the repatriation of hidden funds without penalty or taxation of any kind. Now he’s advocating a more populist one-time 10% tax on them.

Although a key promise of his tax reform plan is to end the practice of stockpiling money in offshore accounts by American companies, he has personally invested in many of the companies that do so. As CBS News noted, in October 2015, Trump owned stock in 22 of the top 30 Fortune 500 companies ranked by their number of offshore subsidiaries. It’s a group that has engineered 1,225 tax-haven subsidiaries holding $1.4 trillion. Of course, Trump has a keen understanding of the practices that disguise or shelter money from taxes. As he explained to supporters in Iowa this January, when it comes to his own business enterprises, "I pay as little as possible. I use every single thing in the book."

Bernie

As far as we know, Bernie has no personal experience with tax havens and has a far more structured plan than either of the leading candidates to combat their money-sucking, tax-dodging prowess. His policies would prevent American companies from avoiding U.S. taxes through inversions, block them from escaping taxes by establishing a post office box in a tax haven site, and end the practice of letting corporations defer paying taxes on profits from offshore subsidiaries.  

In the real world, financial speculation, crime, and tax evasion -- sorry for this word again -- trump the highly touted goal of “free trade” when it comes to tax havens. Bernie understood this well when he voted against the Panama “free trade” agreement of 2011. In a Senate speech on the subject, he presciently noted that “Panama is a world leader when it comes to allowing large corporations and wealthy Americans to evade U.S. taxes by stashing their cash in offshore tax havens. And the Panama free trade agreement would make this bad situation much worse.”

He was right then and he remains right today. Unfortunately, no one was listening or interested in acting on his warning -- certainly not Hillary, who, as secretary of state, characterized the agreement as “an example of the Obama Administration’s commitment to economic statecraft and deepening our economic engagement throughout the world.”

In practical terms, Sanders went significantly further than Hillary by formulating actual legislation on the subject. Last April, he introduced theCorporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act of 2015 in the Senate. Among other things, it aspires to “prevent corporations from sheltering profits in tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands and would stop rewarding companies that ship jobs and factories overseas with tax breaks.”

Regarding inversions, he would treat companies as American for tax purposes if they were majority-owned by U.S. interests and operating in this country. Even his plan, however, would fall short unless it made inversions illegal -- and too many companies are invested in not letting that happen.

Ted

Ted would abolish the Internal Revenue Service and enable people and companies to file taxes on a postcard, so there’s no real point in further analysis of his “positions” on tax havens.

Missing Money Costs

As of 2014, according to Gabriel Zucman, University of California economist and author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations, at least $7.6 trillion, or approximately 8% of global financial wealth, was “missing” somewhere offshore. His analysis demonstrates that the sorts of tax-dodging practices we’ve been discussing put governments across the planet in the red by approximately $200 billion annually. Tax avoidance by major U.S. companies costs governments an additional $130 billion per year since nearly a third of their profits are hidden offshore.

The U.N. estimates that tax dodging by multinational companies costs developing countries $100 billion a year, an amount “equivalent to what it would cost to provide basic life-saving health services or safe water and sanitation to more than 2.2 billion people.”

There are, in other words, harrowing costs to tax dodging. When the wealthy and powerful hide money from governments or speculate with it in sneaky ways, it destabilizes economies and enables the commission of crimes that place a further burden on ordinary people. When money flows from the economic necessities needed by the less privileged to the top fraction of a percent of the world’s population and is then hidden offshore, essentially “disappeared,” it’s a net drain on and a blow to the world economy. This impacts jobs and the quality of our future. Unfortunately, the leading candidates in this election year aren’t championing a major change for the better.

Doing God’s Work – Why Bernie Matters for New York, America, and the World

In the wake of the financial crisis, defending his firm against the wrath of public opinion in November 2009, Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, infamously quipped he was just "doing God's work.” The Lloyd Blankfein I knew when I was a managing director at Goldman Sachs was no comedian. The risk that the current construction of Wall Street banks still imposes upon the general economy is no joke.

Enter Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born presidential contender that has never been paid to perform for Goldman. His message to break up the big banks into less complex components has been ripped apart as single-issue politics, naïve, out of touch with the reality of how things get done. This, from former New York Senator, Hillary Clinton, whose senatorial term covered the entire financial crisis build-up period. Especially for New Yorkers – this IS the most critical issue to consider on Tuesday.

The Big Six banks are bigger (in terms of deposits, assets, and trading market share) than before the financial crisis. This continues to cost taxpayers money.  They have settled various lawsuits and federal investigations for about $130 billion in fines since the crisis. Aside from individuals whose losses were directly caused by the associated practices, we collectively paid and pay for the public service hours of the United States Justice Department and Attorney General offices in handling these investigations and suits. Meanwhile, the remaining threat underlying these actions remains intact. CDOs (collateralized debt obligation at the heart of the financial crisis) get bought and sold daily. They’re called BOT’s now - bespoke tranche opportunities. Same old. Dodd-Frank did not change the size, complexity, inter-dependent relationships or estoric security engineering capabilities of any of the big banks. JPM Chase, the largest US (and New York-based) bank, cared so little about Dodd Frank's tepid requirement for a "living will" (a 'what-happens-now-plan' for after a crisis hits, liquidity dies and people are screwed anyway) that along with four other big banks, it didn't even bother to spend time putting  a plan together. Think about that.  Dodd-Frank is not pre-emptive security to begin with, and yet, a bank that benefitted from acquiring two other banks during the crisis, doesn't care about even pretending to be concerned with an emergency plan that doesn't involve government support.

New York based banks were involved in crimes ranging from mortgage securities fraud, to foreign exchange rate manipulation to interest rate rigging to violation of anti-money laundering laws to a host of other financial shenanigans.  Just last week, Goldman Sachs dusted off another $5 billion settlement (much of it tax-deductible) for misleading investors. It isn’t over. 

Big Banks retain big power, not just over susceptible politicians that financially gain from these relationships in a myriad of ways from campaign contributions to five-figure a plate fundraising dinners to Super PAC and Foundation millions, but over us – our deposits, financial assets and the stability of our economic futures.

Bernie’s overall answer regarding breaking up the banks and actually reducing their systemic risk to the Daily News was correct – it requires a coordinated effort – and the will – from the President, Congress, Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, and the American people. That’s how New York son, FDR got it done when he passed the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that reduced the hazzard of Wall Street’s risk appetite. (Even Republican banks, such as Winthrop Aldrich then then-Chairman of Chase Bank, a legacy bank of JPM Chase, helped - AND - he broke up Chase, as his colleague James Perkins who ran National City Bank (now Citigroup) broke up his bank - before the law was passed.

It was Bernie that was invited to speak at the Vatican on unemployment, poverty, and creating an “economy that works for all people rather than just a few.” As long as the financial game remains rigged and its landscape unaltered, another tumultuous meltdown is inevitable - not impacting those at the top, but crushing the masses at the bottom. Ordinary. Everyday. New Yorkers.

We are about eight years from the onset of the global financial crash that cratered the economy, killed a couple of investment banks and sent the stocks of the surviving Big Six banks plummeting. They recovered with federal aid. Mega-socialism to Wall Street.  That cycle of banking-led problems and gross government negligence prevails today.

New Yorker’s should be concerned about Wall Street - not what might happen under Hillary's “plan” (or Trump's or Cruz’s lack thereof) but what is happening now - among other dangers and injustices, on-going multi-billion dollar fines supported by taxpayers and capitulating policies.

Breaking up banks is not anti-bank, it's pro-people. That’s a distinction that Bernie (and the Vatican) have made. And one that wasn’t expressed during any of Hillary’s years as a New York Senator.

Bernie was criticized for not pointing to a “single” law over which to prosecute big banks in his Daily News interview. Bernie did far more - he underscored the systemic criminality intrinsic to each Wall Street settlement that centers on multiple manifestations of fraud through misleading investors and the public (which is against SEC laws). Not to mention the felony counts that New York-based JPM Chase and four other banks copped to regarding foreign-exchange rate rigging. These cases are settled because banks can afford to settle them, not because the lawsuits weren't predicated on criminal enterprise. They were. Since 2012, Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman's working group has agreed to $45 billion worth of settlements – with just New York-based banks.

If you break up a bank, you break up its ability to scam the public, to stuff loans into fraudulently presented toxic assets and trade them to unsuspecting pension funds. That's what Glass Steagall prevented for decades. You also reduce the cost of investigation and settlements. You reduce the possibility of anyone’s deposit account or mortage loan or insurance contract being held hostage during the next government bailout. You reduce the power inequality that spawns economic inequality. You create longer-lasting global stability. You vote for Bernie.

My Review of Clinton Cash and Why it Matters

Bill and Hillary Clinton have formed political-financial alliances that few former presidents and first ladies have ever established, let alone, have couples seeking to become president and first gentleman. In Peter Schweizer’s latest smash expose, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, he follows the money between their public office and private citizen exploits, through the mega successful, Clinton Foundation. Since 2001, the Clinton Foundation has amassed a staggering $2 billion, mostly in chunks from globally powerful individuals, multinational companies and foreign countries.

Schweizer lays out compelling patterns in which the timing of policy decisions or international deals relative to donations, transcends coincidence - or at least, merits closer inspection. He narrates with crisp prose and illuminating detail. Though a few errors exist about certain speaking fees and event sequences, there’s no question that Bill Clinton’s speaking fees rose substantially after Hillary took the helm of State, as did Clinton Foundation donations from foreign countries and certain controversial operators.

The book runs 245 pages with an impressive 56 pages of endnotes. It might be tempting to dismiss Clinton Cash as a product of Schweizer’s own conservative leanings. Yet, his more recent works, Throw Them All Out and Extortion, have examined shenanigans on both sides of the aisle.

Plus, placing issues of possible impropriety or illegality in a partisan box, ignores the dangers of an oligarchical political system that hopelessly blurs public and private lines. The Clintons are champions of the ‘Clinton Blur’ as Schweizer dubs two of his chapters.

The Clintons are not alone in fusing the lines of public service and private positioning. As first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt ran many charitable initiatives. Yet, unlike Bill Clinton, who claims he needs high speaking fees to “pay our bills”, she donated her writing fees. President Harry Truman bestowed his humble post-presidential speaking fees to build the Truman Library. The Carters run the Carter Center dedicated to humanitarian causes. The George W. Bush Foundation raised more than $341 million from 2006 to 2011. Nearly half of the 2010-2011 funds came from 16 donors, which begs further investigation. Still, those figures pale in comparison to the Clinton Foundation money and power machine.

The Clintons, and various members of the press, have condemned Clinton Cash, both for what they deem to be unsubstantiated slams, and for being misleading and containing certain factual errors. For the most part, these beckon further debate and exploration, rather than being downright wrong.

For instance, in Chapter 3, Hillary’s Reset, Schweizer indicates Hillary was involved in approving the sale of a Canadian company, Uranium One, which held a large stake in US uranium output to the Russian State Atomic Nuclear Agency (Rosatom). A Time magazine article found nothing linking Hillary specifically (or solely) to the related conversations. Yet, large donations did came from Uranium One Chairman, Ian Telfer, concurrent with the deal, and while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.

Schweizer concedes in Chapter 5, The Clinton Blur (1) that, “The Clinton's ability to convene various public and private interests around a common cause or project does create leverage for getting things done in the global arena.” But, he goes on to say, “the blur also creates opportunity for moving a lot of money around with very little accountability.”

Certain longtime Clinton supporters are sketchy to criminal in behavior. One of them, Vinod Gupta, Indian entrepreneur and founder and chairman of InfoUSA, was a Clinton Foundation trustee. In 2010, he was charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for using $9.5 million in company funds to support his extravagant lifestyle. He settled with the SEC for $7.3 million. His shareholders filed a separate suit over “misuse of corporate funds” including a $3 million consulting fee to Bill Clinton and “using corporate assets to fly the Clintons around.” The company settled for $13 million.

Sant Singh Chatwal, another trustee, was convicted for illegal campaign financing and obstruction of justice. He got no jail-time. Clinton Foundation board member, Argentine mogul, Rolando Gonzalez Bunster, was named in a fraud case in the Dominican Republic.

One could argue that it’s not the Clintons fault that some of their star supporters have such legality issues, though the company they keep renders their dismissals of conflicts of interest claims, less palatable. Maybe they should hang with a better class of billionaires?

By Schweizer’s tabulation, approximately 75% of the Clinton Foundation’s money has come from contributions of $1 million or more, with a fair share from foreign nationals. Some of that money buys respect in the Clinton circle, if not overt policy favoritism. Notable dictators from countries like Ethiopia and Rwanda were invited guests at Clinton Foundation events and praised for their leadership.

Some of that money secures profitable business deals. In 2009, Schweizer writes, Hillary Clinton “pushed Russian officials to sign a [$3.7 billion] airplane agreement with Boeing. Two months after Boeing won the contract, the company pledged $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation.” In Haiti, Schweizer depicts certain disaster-relief contracts as awarded along the lines of Clinton Foundation donors. These depictions have been criticized for accuracy, though still point toward partiality, if not direct money flow.

Beginning in 2009, Schweizer writes, “Swedish telecom giant Ericsson came under US pressure for selling telecom equipment to oppressive governments,” including to Sudan, Syria, and Iran and Belarus. Erickson decided to sponsor a speech for which Bill Clinton received a record $750,000 at a Telecom conference. A week later on November 19^th, 2011, the State Department had removed telecoms from its sanctions list. The causality again isn’t distinctly proven. However the order of events is eye raising.

In Chapter 8, Warlord Economics, Schweizer writes that as a senator, Hillary “took the lead in rooting out Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) corruption and violence.” But when she became Secretary of State, her stance had softened considerably. According to Schweizer, certain “changes in policies conformed with the interest of Clinton Foundation large donors.”

He notes that, “The cluster of donors and advisers to the Clintons who rely on warlords and corrupt dictators is not confined to the DRC, Ethiopia, or Sudan.” It includes a Clinton pal with ties to the corrupt regime in Nigeria where Bill Clinton gave two of his most lucrative talks ($700,000 each) after Hillary became Secretary of State.

Controversial billionaire businessman Gilbert Chagoury made a fortune aiding former Nigerian dictator, Sani Abacha in various oil and money funneling schemes. His name comes up frequently regarding bribery and other scandals, though he was never explicitly charged by the US Department of Justice.

In response to the book, Bill Clinton has insisted, “There is no doubt in my mind that we have never done anything knowingly inappropriate in terms of taking money to influence any kind of American government policy.” He added, “I asked Hillary about this, and she said, ‘No one has ever tried to influence me by helping you.’”  Hillary could still treat their friends and Clinton Foundation donors deferentially, though. The question is -  to what degree? Where does acceptance of help in one area imply wanting, or getting, something in return in another?

The Clinton Foundation has admitted disclosure errors regarding certain donations, and claims it will increase the frequency of its financial statements and limit large donations from foreign governments. These matters remain a red flag.

Corruption in politics is bi-partisan. The power of money is bi-partisan. Lines get crossed for alliance and sway reasons continuously. The Clintons want to portray themselves as having crossed no lines, despite the myriad of individuals, companies and countries that benefited from their relationship with them, and vice versa. Schweizer provides a damning portrait of elite and circumspect power and influence. He also acknowledges that, “Corruption of the kind” he describes in Clinton Cash “is very difficult to prove.”

Given that Hillary Clinton is running for President, the motives of these larger Clinton Foundation foreign donors and speaker fees to Bill Clinton while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, require greater inspection. As Schweizer stresses, “the pattern of behavior I have established is too blatant to ignore, and deserves legal scrutiny by those with investigation capabilities that go beyond journalism.”

At the end of Clinton Cash, Schweizer concludes that “money carries a serious weight, gather enough weight and you can intimidate most people into not questioning how you got it.” Whether the Clintons are corrupt, or successful opportunists requires a deeper federal investigation. Since new US Attorney General, Loretta Lynch first came to professional prominence as Bill Clinton’s appointee for US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, the possibility of a Department of Justice (DOJ) probe is remote. That’s a story for another time.

This article first appeared in Forbes.