#Venezuela-#Turkey #Gold for Food Trading Scheme hides many stories

Retrofitted criminal networks are being used to trade gold for the subsidized food rations that's propping up the regime.

Good piece from Bloomberg on the criminal alliance between the new best friends, Venezuela's Maduro and Turkey's Erdogan-and the ColombianLebanese raking in the billions along the way... As They say, My Enemy's Enemy, is My Friend...

"With the coup attempt," Erdogan said at a news conference earlier this year, "we met Maduro. It has been a good beginning."

Maduro and Erdogan in Istanbul in October 2016.

Photographer: Kayhan Ozer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Within weeks of the July call, Maduro announced his first trip to Turkey. Before the end of 2016, that Turkish Airlines route between Istanbul and Caracas was inaugurated, and delegations from the two countries started crisscrossing the Atlantic to forge deals. They began to construct a secretive business network, one that could operate out of reach of financial sanctions imposed by the U.S. It would be a network that trades in two powerful currencies for Venezuela: gold and food.

Maduro was saddled with a near-worthless currency, the bolívar, that had been bludgeoned by years of hyperinflation. Profits from his country's massive oil reserves, which had funded the Venezuelan government for decades, were evaporating because of falling prices, a neglected and crumbling infrastructure, rampant corruption, and international isolation. Venezuelans were starving, and Maduro's approval rating had plummeted. So he grasped a financial lifeline in gold, one of the only resources of value he had left.

In August 2016, Maduro announced that a state mining company called Minerven would be the sole official gold buyer in the vast tracts of jungle, savanna, and rolling hills where mining had long been clandestine and unregulated—essentially legalizing a business lorded over by murderous gangs. He sent in troops to force miners to comply and began hoovering up ore from open-pit mines. (Through a spokesman, Victor Cano, the mining minister, declined to comment for this story.) Maduro also started cashing in on the billions of dollars' worth of gold bars that Chávez, who was loath to invest in U.S. dollars, had stockpiled. The sell-off carried hints of desperation. According to sources in Venezuela's central bank, the government secretly sold the bank's massive collection of rare gold coins, dating to the 18th century. The coins, box upon box of them, were thrown together in a single 30-ton sale in late 2017, and Venezuela accepted a price based on their weight alone, not their collectible value.

The Clintons, a luxury jet and their $100 million donor from #Canada @WashingtonPost

Frank Giustra's relationship with Bill Clinton comes under the microscope now that Hillary is running for president. 

The Clintons, a luxury jet and their $100 million donor from Canada

Bill Clinton was planning a charity trip to Latin America and needed a big plane.

For Frank Giustra, who had never met the former president, this was an opportunity. The Canadian mining magnate and onetime Hollywood studio owner stepped up to let the former president borrow his luxurious passenger jet. There was just one condition: Giustra would come along for the ride.

That 2005 trip was the start of an intense, mutually beneficial friendship — one that has helped propel the Clinton Foundation into a global giant and established Giustra’s reputation as an international philanthropist while helping him build connections in countries where his business was expanding.

Giustra has since committed more than $100 million to the work of the Clinton Foundation, becoming one of the largest individual donors to the family’s charities.

Clinton has also gained regular transportation, borrowing Giustra’s plane 26 times for foundation business since 2005, including 13 trips in which the two men traveled together. The numbers on Clinton’s use of the plane, never previously reported, were provided by a spokeswoman for Giustra.

View Graphic 

Explore the connections of a Clinton donor.

The relationship has gained attention as Hillary Rodham Clinton has launched her presidential campaign amid questions about whether the Clinton Foundation has served as an avenue for wealthy interests to gain entree to a powerful family.

Giustra, 57, a Vancouver, B.C.-based mogul whose eclectic business interests include founding Lionsgate Entertainment and investing in gold mines and an olive oil company, has come to symbolize a relatively new but substantial category of Clinton backers: foreign donors who are not legally eligible to contribute to U.S. political candidates but grew close to the Clintons through the charity.

[Clintons’ foundation has raised nearly $2 billion — and some key questions]

In a rare interview, Giustra told The Washington Post recently that his friendship with Bill Clinton has grown entirely out of their shared interest in philanthropy — not business.

“I have one very specific reason I have a relationship with Bill Clinton: I admire what he does, and I want to be part of it,” Giustra said. “But I’ve never asked him for a damn thing.”

But Giustra’s donations, and others from his friends in the international mining business, are becoming a factor in Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Last week, the Clinton Foundation acknowledged that an affiliated Canadian charity founded in 2007 by Giustra kept its donors secret, despite a 2008 ethics agreement with the Obama administration promising to reveal the New York-based foundation’s donors.