More on Bill & Frank in Kazakhstan: a mere sop for Hillary

Media Matters for America notes the following about the Bill & Frank Kazakhstan mining show: 

In an article about former President Bill Clinton’s September 2005 trip to Kazakhstan with Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra, The New York Times suggested that Giustra was able to secure agreements giving his company the right to buy into Kazakh mining projects because of his connection to Clinton. The Times did not note that Giustra was reportedly involved in Kazakh mining deals more than a decade ago. (My emphasis.)

The site proceeds to quote from the September 4, 1995, edition of Maclean’s:

While Giustra heads Yorkton, none of the 75 shareholders (including Giustra) owns more than 10 percent of its shares. A good many of those are geologists, accountants, economists and corporate finance specialists who spend their professional lives earning for Yorkton what the firm’s chairman describes as ”our franchise as the brokerage world’s best and largest natural resource group.” Instead of waiting around for prospectors to arrive with big dreams and small claims, the Yorkton operatives dispatch due diligence teams to some pretty obscure corners, searching for new mines. ”Just once,” complains Giustra, ”just once, I wish somebody would discover a deposit in Tuscany or the French Riviera. We seem to be always finding mines in the most bizarre places.” Tony Williams, the capable geologist who heads Yorkton’s London office, for example, is in the process of putting a complicated but potentially promising gold-mining deal together deep in the heart of Kazakhstan, one of the more obscure former Soviet republics.”

All well and good, but it took twelve long years before Bill seems to have snapped up the deal in one midnight banquet.