Questions raised over Arab cash to Clinton charity ahead of presidential bid

Four oil-rich Arab nations, all with histories of philanthropy to United Nations and Middle Eastern causes, have donated vastly more money to the Clinton Foundation than they have to most other private charities involved in the kinds of global work championed by the Clintons.

Since 2001, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates gave as much as US$40 million to the Clinton Foundation. In contrast, six similar non-governmental global charities collected no money from those same four Middle Eastern countries; the International Committee of the Red Cross was given US$6.82 million.

The existence of foreign donors to the Clinton Foundation has been well-documented. What hasn't been revealed, however, is the disparity in donations by these four nations, all of which have been criticised by the State Department over the years for a spate of issues ranging from the mistreatment of women to stoking ethnic discord in the flammable Middle East.

Moreover, the level of Arab support for the Clinton Foundation, which occurred during the time Hillary Rodham Clinton was a US senator, was seeking the Democratic nomination for president against Barack Obama and was serving as secretary of state, fuels questions about the reasons for the donations. Were they solely to support the foundation's causes, or were they designed to curry favour with the ex-president and with a potential future president?

"The fundamental issue here is that you've got foreign businesses and foreign governments giving money to the Clinton Foundation partly because of the foundation's work, but also because of the access to the upper echelons of power in America," said Lawrence Jacobs, a professor at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs and a prize-winning author of numerous books on politics.

"I think the people who know something about politics understand the wink and a nod that's going on here: Give to Bill and become a friend of Hillary... There's kind of a political shakedown going on here."