Slick Willy, Shakira and Scientologists party with miners

The mining community in Toronto soaked in a rare bit of showbiz glamour during the week ended March 1, the ninth trading week of 2008.

The Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative (CGSGI) charity rolled into town on March 1 to hold a banquet and raise money for Third World mining communities. Guests and performers included former U. S. president Bill Clinton, Elton John, Robin Williams, John Travolta, Kelly Preston, Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, Shakira, Wyclef Jean, Norah Jones, Burton Cummings and Eugene Levy.

While we applaud good works and hope this one becomes a success, it’s been eight months since the CGSGI was launched and it’s still not clear what the charity is actually doing to alleviate poverty, or even what the specific plans are.

Clinton’s larger umbrella charity, the William J. Clinton Foundation, has come under fire south of the border for its lack of transparency for refusing to reveal its list of donors, which include the Saudi royal family and foreign governments. The foundation has raised more than US$500 million so far, including US$131 million from mining financier and former movie mogul Frank Giustra.

Political donations to Bill’s wife Hillary, who is running for U. S. president, are capped at US$2,300 per person per election and limited to U. S. citizens, while donations to the Clinton Foundation can be anonymous, unlimited, and made by anyone.

Thus a concern is that major political influence with Hillary can be had by donating to the Clinton Foundation, especially with Bill insisting he would continue to raise money for his foundation if Hillary becomes president, and would then only reveal the donors on a “go-forward” basis. Hillary is also refusing to release her income tax statements unless she wins the Democratic Party’s nomination as presidential candidate.

Media access was constrained at the CGSGI event, probably in response to recent, highly critical articles and editorials in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Bloomberg that looked at how Giustra flew Bill to Kazakhstan in September 2005 to meet with its strongman president, soon after which Giustra’s company UrAsia Energy (since merged into Uranium One) was awarded lucrative state-owned uranium assets there. Giustra followed up months later with a US$31-million donation to the Clinton Foundation, a sum that was only acknowleged in December 2007. Giustra and Clinton say these things are unconnected.

• Canada’s pro-free-market research organization, the Fraser Institute, released its annual Survey of Mining Companies, which this year has the province of Quebec topping the list of 68 jurisdictions with respect to the best policy environment, followed by Nevada and Finland. Rounding out the top 10 were Alberta, Manitoba, Chile, Utah, Wyoming, Ireland and Sweden.

The bottom ten were: Honduras, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, Panama, Bolivia, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, the Philippines and Venezuela.

The survey is a helpful tool that miners can use to lobby governments to improve their mineral policies compared to competing jurisdictions around the world.

So it’s always a shock for us to see just how low the participation rate is for these surveys: out of about 3,000 surveys sent out to mining companies, only 372 companies, or 12%, could be bothered to spend a few hours to respond.

• The geopolitical scene in South America heated up on March 1, when the Colombian air force scored a major victory by killing Raul Reyes, second in command of the narco-terrorist insurgent group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). He’s the highest ranking FARC commander killed in 44 years of fighting. However, the airstrike was carried out 2 km inside Ecuadorian territory, which has sparked a diplomatic standoff between Colombia and Ecuador, and prompted Venezuelan president and FARC supporter Hugo Chavez to rush troops to its border with Colombia.

This fool Chavez called for a minute’s public silence to mark Reyes’ death, praised him as “a great revolutionary,” and said that the Colombian government “has become the Israel of Latin America. . . we aren’t going to permit Colombia to become the Israel of these lands.”