After the earthquakes that rocked Haiti in 2010 left hundreds of thousands of people homeless, Bill Clinton’s half-brother promised a Houston businessman he could help land contracts to rebuild.
Roger Clinton took $100,000 from the man on the promise that influence from his brother could get him a contract through the Clinton Foundation for a project building new houses, The New York Times reports.
The Houston builder, Wayne Coleman, proposed to build cheap, concrete homes for the Haitians who lost theirs in the disaster, and paid Clinton $5,000 per month to make sure he could do that.
The plan didn’t pan out, though, as Coleman told the Times, Bill Clinton took a tour of his demonstration home, but in the end chose to go with a different company.
According to Coleman, Roger Clinton’s lawyer, Walter Wiggins Jr., got involved in the deal to lend some credibility to the whole situation, but it didn’t help.
“He was basically trying to help Roger, because Roger was kind of a screwball, you could never pin him down on anything,” Coleman told the Times. “I probably lost about half a million dollars over all on the whole thing.”
Roger Clinton wasn’t the only member of the Clinton extended family, trying to profit off the disaster in Haiti, though.
Tony Rodham, brother of Hillary Rodham Clinton, sat on the board of one of just two mining companies given permits to dig for gold in the country.
In 2012, while Clinton worked as U.S. Secretary of State, the small North Carolina company, VCS Mining, received a “gold exploitation permit” from the Haitian government, the first issued in over 50 years.
The project in Haiti is the only project listed on the VCS Mining website.
