Lobbyists for the nation of Poland marked a win today as the country expressed relief at a scaled down US-sponsored missile shield, a turning point in negotiations between the countries in which Poland relied not just on diplomats, but on K Street lobbyists paid hundreds of thousands of dollars , too. The Obama administration last month agreed to dramatically scale down an Eastern European defense system that offended Russia and put a wary Poland on edge. The Bush plan would have used Poland as a potential launching point for missiles intercepting projectiles from Iran, but some viewed its ulterior target at Russia.
Talks between the US and Poland on a missile defense system took on an unexpected urgency when Russian tanks rolled in to Georgia in a territorial dispute last year. Polish lobbyists met 70 times with the Administration and 38 times with House of Representatives and Senate staff between June and November to negotiate an arrangement under which the United States would install a missile defense system in Poland, ostensibly to deter threats from Iran. Such diplomacy can be a zero-sum game, however: Russia claimed the system was aimed at it and declared that installation “could not go unpunished,” meaning that striking a deal with one Eastern European country would deal a blow to relations with its larger neighbor. In May, funding for the system was stripped by House Democrats who did not view Iran as an imminent threat.
The negotiations played out against the backdrop of the US presidential campaign; while then-candidate Barack Obama criticized the defense system, the Polish foreign minister met with his opponent, Sen. John McCain, in September. Making as many as eight contacts in a day that month, Polish lobbyists communicated with key committees and members in the House and Senate and with then-deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO policy Dan Fata, who left government to work for international lobby shop the Cohen Group (and has since publicly advocated for the missile base), and Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, a former ambassador to Poland.
(Keep reading...)In the past few years a handful of private equity or hedge funds have garnered a reputation as “vulture funds,” a term coined to describe companies that profit from the debt of extremely poor countries. The hedge funds buy defaulted debt for pennies on the dollar, then sue them later for the full amount owed in U.S. and European courts.
Both in 2008 and earlier this year, members of Congress introduced bills to protect these debtor nations from lawsuits. The legislation was introduced after heavy lobbying campaigns by countries like the Republic of the Congo, which has spent millions of dollars hiring D.C.-based heavyweight lobbying firms.
The hedge firms–like Kensington International Ltd. which fought a long drawn case with the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville)–claim that corrupt practices by rulers, and not the poverty of the countries, are the reason they are not able to repay their debts.
Kensington International, based in the Cayman Islands, is a subsidiary of Elliott Associates, a New York company. In the 1990s, Kensington bought up several debt packages worth $100 million from Congo, which led to a decade-long round of negotiations and legal battles spanning a few continents before the lawsuit was settled in 2007. But before that happened, Kensington International’s sleuthing uncovered a series of hidden bank accounts, some belonging to the President’s son, straw men and companies in tax-haven countries run by the head of the Congo’s state-owned oil and gas company SNPC.
(Keep reading...)The Defense Department’s request last week for congressional approval of the sale of $8 billion worth of PAC-3 missiles to Turkey was the latest victory for a disparate group of interests including defense contractors, finance and energy corporations, trade groups, the Turkish government and a well-financed network of domestic advocacy groups. Intersecting interests have led them to join forces and lobby on a number of issues, including the characterization of distant historical events.
Turkey and the domestic advocacy groups that promote the interests of Turkish-Americans did so to protect the Turkey’s image, while U.S. companies sought to bolster their own bottom lines. The efforts appear to have been successful for all the parties.
The Turkish government has consistently lavished millions each year on well-connected Washington lobbying firms–including those employing former House leaders–which contacted offices of the lower chamber 1,468 times, according to an analysis of data from Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker of disclosures filed in 2008 by firms under the Foreign Agent Registration Act—nearly twice that of the second-highest country, Libya.
Turkey’s efforts have now been augmented by a domestic effort launched by a Turkish-American entrepreneur. Yalcin Ayasli founded Hittite Microwave in 1985 as a one-man company with a grant from the U.S. Air Force, and built the electronics company into a firm worth $1.2 billion, with half of its products sold overseas, according to a company presentation. The company had $180 million in revenue in 2008, according to SEC filings.
Since 2004, Hittite Microwave has received roughly $30 million in contracts directly from the government—mostly to sponsor research and development—and has also done business with Lockheed Martin and other prime contractors, many of whom use Hittite electronics in their jets and other equipment, sold to both the U.S. military and Turkey.
In 2007, Ayasli transferred $30 million in stock to fund a new endeavor, the nonprofit Turkish Coalition of America. The organization is headquartered in a Washington suite that has also been listed as the address for the Turkish Coalition USA PAC, the lobbying firm of Lydia Borland (who has represented the Turkish government), and the law firm of Bruce Fein and Associates (Fein comprises half of the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund).
(Keep reading...)Labeling the killing of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923, many at the hands of Ottoman government, an act of genocide has been a controversial issue in Turkey, among some historians, in the U.S. Congress, and now in the unlikely venue of the Ohio Board of Elections, where recent hearings indirectly considered the government of Turkey’s connection, if any, to Turkish advocacy groups in Washington.
Backed by lawyers from the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund, Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, filed a false claims complaint against David Krikorian, who ran against her in 2008 as an independent and garnered 18 percent of the vote. Schmidt’s complaint stems from campaign literature in which Krikorian claimed she “has taken $30,000 in blood money from Turkish sponsored political action committees to deny the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children by the Ottoman Turkish government during World War I.”
Though Jean Schmidt doesn’t sit on the subcommittee responsible for the Armenian Genocide legislation, it’s clear that she’s a favorite of the Turkish community. With $18,450 in contributions from three Turkish-focused PACs since 2007, the second-term House member has received far more than even influential senior members, and nearly twice as much as the second-highest recipient, Virginia Foxx, whose son-in-law is Turkish. A list of fundraisers compiled by the Turkish Coalition USA PAC shows that the group held several events for Schmidt, raising thousands more. And four individuals who gave to Turkish PACs also donated a combined $8,700 directly to Schmidt’s campaign.
(Keep reading...)A diplomatic breakthrough in the longstanding feud between Turkey and Armenia puts a renewed focus on the United States’ role in that dispute last year. Turkey mounted the largest foreign lobbying effort of 2008 in order to deter the U.S. Congress from declaring events in that part of the world 85 years prior as a genocide. The lobbying onslaught appeared to have worked, we’ve written on our Foreign Lobbyist Influence Tracker, but under an agreement floated this week, the Wall Street Journal reports today, the countries have taken steps to open relations while agreeing to mount a joint historical investigation into the deaths, which numbered as high as 1.5 million.
(Keep reading...)Swiss mega-bank UBS has dominated recent headlines with its reluctant release of a subset of the list of Americans using the accounts, long shrouded in secrecy, to avoid paying taxes to the US.
But it was an obscure microstate that set off the banking-secrecy firestorm last year when other nations obtained evidence that hundreds of its citizens were sidestepping billions of dollars in taxes by hiding money in secret accounts there.
The probe into anonymous bank accounts began in the tiny German-speaking nation of Liechtenstein, when an employee of the LGT Group bank, which is owned by the country’s royal family, sold a compact disc containing information on foreign account holders to authorities in Germany, and then Britain and the US.
Heinrich Kieber, the IT staffer tasked with digitizing paper records who got rich by turning over the documents implicating wealthy tax-avoiders, is now wanted by Interpol, but German authorities have reportedly given a new identity to the balding 44-year old who now has the means to live comfortably, yet is despised by untold numbers of powerful men across the globe.
(Keep reading...)Perhaps the most interesting character to turn up in records of agents lobbying on behalf of foreign countries and organizations is not a government official, nor can he even be linked to a single country. In fact, it’s not entirely clear why a former Israeli spy who once tried to implicate the president of Zimbabwe’s opposition in an assassination attempt and who is registered as a foreign agent was paid by a South African expatriate at all.
At its simplest, 35-year old Paul Calder LeRoux, a citizen of Australia and South Africa, hired the spy-turned-political consultant, now operating out of Canada, to facilitate a run-of-the-mill real estate deal, in this case for vast swaths of farmland in Zimbabwe. Like anyone else employing a lobbyist, he was essentially paying for the hired gun’s connections–in this case to president Robert Mugabe.
“I happen to know people,” the agent, Ari Ben-Menashe, told Sunlight of the way his unusually storied life has translated into political chops.
While his career has been a far cry from that of the typical Washington lobbyist, his knack for public relations stunts and spinning of facts–or outright fabrication–have served him in that field.
In Zimbabwe’s 2002 presidential election Mugabe defeated his opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, by the narrowest of margins in what was widely decried as a Mugabe-rigged election. Tsvangirai spoke with Ben-Menashe about a plan to “eliminate” Mugabe. Ben-Menashe turned over a videotape of the conversation to Mugabe’s administration, and Tsvangirai was charged with treason.
(Keep reading...)When President Barack Obama promised in May to raise an additional $210 billion in taxes a year by closing corporate loopholes and cracking down on individual tax cheats, he pointed to an address in the Cayman Islands listed by 12,000 corporations as the kind of abuse his proposals would shut down. “Either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world,” the President said.
The line, recycled from his stump speech, was one that the Caribbean jurisdiction had responded to many times before. They have defended Ugland House, the building Obama referred to, and argued that the Cayman Islands are well regulated and transparent, to presidential candidates, executive branch officials, members of Congress and their staffs. In a revenue starved Washington, they’re not the only tax haven lobbying.
Disclosures filed in 2008 show that six governments–Aruba, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Man, Liechtenstein and the States of Jersey–and the Bank of the Netherlands Antilles employed U.S. lobbyists, paying a total of $2.3 million in fees. Those lobbyists had at least 222 contacts with members of Congress, their staff and executive branch officials in which they discussed tax laws, legislation aimed at tax havens like the Stop Tax Haven Abuse bill, or efforts to negotiate tax exchange information agreements with the United States and other countries.
(Keep reading...)Typical attire: sandals and maroon-saffron robe. Typical day: wake at 3:30 a.m., prayer and meditation. Typical message: peace, nonviolence and independence for his spiritual homeland, Tibet.
If you guessed the Dalai Lama, you’re right. But did you know he has a lobbyist, too?
We never imagined Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader would show up in our new Foreign Lobbyist Influence Tracker. But there he is amid details about the Office of Tibet, which handles his affairs in the U.S.
(Keep reading...)In 2008, Bermuda’s influential reinsurance industry needed some help. Successive seasons of monster hurricanes in the United States, where much of its client base is, had cost these insurers of insurance companies $22 billion in losses. Eager to avoid a repeat — and unable to change the weather — the companies and Bermuda’s government turned to something they could influence: The U.S. Congress.
At the behest of his government’s lobbyist, Premier Ewart Brown of Bermuda met in June with key congressmen, among them the powerful House Ways and Means chairman, Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., and two Democrats from states in hurricane alley, G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi.
The sessions, Brown boasted later in Bermuda’s Royal Gazette, were part of a “very successful trip” that included “meetings with people who were not even on the schedule.”
In fact, the success was almost immediate.
(Keep reading...)It isn’t just U.S. companies or groups that push for their causes on Capitol Hill. Thousands of times each year, lobbyists for foreign governments and other overseas organizations reach out to members of Congress and other U.S. leaders to make their case on issues important to them.
But counting up those thousands of contacts hasn’t been easy. Records detailing what foreign entities are lobbying, who they’re contacting and why are filed on paper forms, sometimes in handwriting that’s little more than a scrawl. After prodding from open-government groups, the Department of Justice put scanned copies of the forms on its Web site in 2007, but in a fashion that’s barely an advance over the old-fashioned card catalog.
Now, the Sunlight Foundation and ProPublica have taken more than a year’s worth of data filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, and put it in a digital format that can be easily searched and analyzed to discover all the players in the foreign lobbying game.
(Keep reading...)Filings under the Foreign Agent Registration Act provide far more detail on how lobbyists interact with government officials than those required by the Lobbying Disclosure Act; they contain information on efforts by foreign governments and organizations to influence U.S. policy on trade, taxation, foreign aid, appropriations, human rights and national security.
Since May 2007 the Justice Department has maintained a Web site that posts image files [pdf] of FARA disclosures online, but none of that information is available in a digitized format. Thus, it is impossible, for example, to see how many times the office of an individual member of Congress has been contacted. With the Foreign Lobbyist Influence Tracker, you can now find out with ease by selecting any member’s name from the pull-down list.
For more detailed information on FARA filings view our methodology.