A charity tied with the Clinton Foundation reportedly failed to reveal the identities of at least 1,100 donors, in the latest detail to emerge about the group’s finances following days of intense public scrutiny.
The Canada-based Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership could be a potential gateway for anonymous Clinton Foundation donations from foreign business leaders because Canadian law prohibits charities from disclosing individual donors without their permission.
The Washington Post reports the partnership sends much of its money to the Clinton Foundation, and reported the latest information about undisclosed donors.
A spokeswoman for the Canadian group told the Washington Post the majority of the 1,100 donors gave small donations while attending a 2008 fundraising event.
Two of the partnership’s most-known donors – the group’s founder and mining executive Frank Giustra and another miner Ian Tefler – are featured in a tell-all book “Clinton Cash” for their roles in deals that resulted in Russia being in control of many of the world’s uranium deposits.
The partnership has recently begun to reach out to more than 25 of its largest donors to seek permission to reveal their names. The paper reports that those donors have given at least $250,000 to the organization.
The large number of undisclosed donors calls into question the foundation’s ethics agreement it struck with the Obama administration in 2008. Those guidelines were meant to avoid certain conflicts of interest during Hillary Clinton’s time at the State Department.
A Clinton Foundation spokesman for the Clinton Foundation told the paper the agreement with the Obama administration did not apply to the Canadian organization.
On Sunday, the Clinton Foundation acknowledged that it “made mistakes” in IRS filings and defended its disclosure of controversial contributions from a Canadian financier.
“We made mistakes, as many organizations of our size do, but we are acting quickly to remedy them,” foundation executive Maura Pally wrote on the foundation website. “And [we] have taken steps to ensure they don’t happen in the future.”
Pally also wrote Sunday that the foundation has already said it will likely re-file tax forms for some years, following the completion of a voluntary external review.
However, she says the effort was not an admission that the foundation failed to report all of its revenue.
“That is not the case,” Pally writes. “Our total revenue was accurately reported on each year’s form.”
She said the errors were the result of government grants being “mistakenly combined with other donations.”
Pally also argued that the foundation’s policies for donor disclosures and foreign-government contributors are “stronger than ever” and that the group has already announced that it will accept funding from only a “handful of governments,” including many whose multi-year grants for philanthropic work have yet to be completed.
“We are committed to operating the foundation responsibly and effectively to continue the life-changing work that this philanthropy is doing every day,” Pally wrote.
The concerns about the foundation’s contributions and finances are being raised as Clinton’s wife, Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, makes a 2016 White House bid.