An industrial park in Haiti with extensive ties to the Clinton Foundation continues to be granted federal aid without oversight mandated by law, according to a report published last week.
The Government Accountability Office investigation found that projects associated with the Caracol Industrial Park in north Haiti were green-lighted by the United States Agency for International Development in spite of the fact that the legally-required sustainability reviews of those projects were not completed.
“USAID/Haiti officials have not completed a 611(e) certification for every activity that might require it and have provided inconsistently detailed information in the completed certifications,” the GAO report noted. The certification is needed to determine a “host country’s capability to effectively maintain and utilize” any proposed project expected to cost more than $1 million.
“Consequently, the agency may not be in full compliance with the 611(e) requirement, and agency officials may lack access to information about risks to the sustainability of large infrastructure activities,” the GAO also noted.
The Caracol Industrial Park is one of the flagship reconstruction projects in Haiti funded by international donors after a massive earthquake devastated the impoverished Carribbean nation in 2010.
The GAO had been looking into US-taxpayer backed reconstruction efforts as a whole. Over half of the $1.7 billion allocated by Congress for post-earthquake recovery has not yet been spent. One-third of that money has not yet been allocated to any project, the report noted.
The Clinton Foundation helped establish Caracol alongside The State Department, the Haitian government, and the Inter-American Development Bank. It opened in 2012, while Hillary Clinton was still Secretary of State, and has been overseen, in part, by her husband, former president Bill Clinton, in his capacity as co-chair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission and as a Clinton Foundation board member.
The GAO report singles out a power plant constructed for the industrial park as an example of a project that may not have been carried out in full compliance with the law. While a sustainability certification was completed by USAID in April 2011, the GAO later found that the Haitian government did not in fact possess the capacity to independently operate and maintain the plant.
“[R]evenue from industrial park tenants for the Caracol Industrial Park power plant has been less than expected and has not helped to cover plant operations and maintenance costs to the extent planned,” the GAO report says.
The findings of the report come at a time when the activities of the Clinton Foundation have come under an increased amount of scrutiny from journalists and public watchdog groups.
Many critics have charged that the Clintons’ handling of the reconstruction effort has the appearance of a “pay-to-play” operation given both the extent of their control over efforts and the fact that the Clintons’ friends and donors have won the rights to carry out many projects.
“It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons,” Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, said in April, in a statement to the New York Post.
