The New York Times reports on Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch with extensive ties to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s State Department, as he tries to curry favor to win an anti-dumping dispute with American steel companies. Pinchuk’s Clinton ties won’t look good to steelworkers in critical states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, where Clinton did well with during the 2008 Democratic primaries:
Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton have built a sprawling network of powerful friends around the globe, one that could aid Mrs. Clinton’s chances were she to seek the presidency. But those relationships often come with intersecting interests and political complications; few people illustrate that more vividly than the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk.
A steel magnate and major contributor to the former president’s foundation, Mr. Pinchuk was in frequent contact with Mrs. Clinton’s State Department, at meetings arranged by a Clinton political operative turned lobbyist, Douglas E. Schoen.
And now Mr. Pinchuk is at the center of a trade dispute that places him at odds with steelworkers in Pennsylvania and Ohio, precisely the kind of union workers Mrs. Clinton would need to appeal to in a presidential campaign.
Mr. Pinchuk’s relationship to the Clintons became the subject of scrutiny last summer when American steel makers filed a case alleging that Ukraine —and by extension Mr. Pinchuk’s company, Interpipe Ltd. — and eight other countries had illegally dumped a type of steel tube used in natural gas extraction, an industry whose growth has provided one of the few bright spots in the United States manufacturing sector.
The Commerce Department is expected to issue a preliminary ruling in the case as early as Thursday. If it decides that dumping occurred, it could impose duties on Interpipe’s steel imports, which, analysts say, would push the indebted company deeper into financial distress. …
Spokesmen for the Clintons declined to comment on the relationship. …
Since 2006, Mr. Pinchuk has donated roughly $13.1 million to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. Mr. Clinton attends Mr. Pinchuk’s annual conferences in the resort city of Yalta, Ukraine, and Mr. Pinchuk attended the former president’s 65th birthday party in Los Angeles. He was first introduced to Mr. Clinton in 2004 by Mr. Schoen, a New York-based pollster who has advised both Clintons. Mr. Pinchuk immediately began building a friendship with the former president and enthusiastically donating to Mr. Clinton’s causes, including an H.I.V. program that was later expanded into Ukraine.
Mr. Schoen had been on a $40,000-per-month retainer as an adviser to Mr. Pinchuk since 2000. In 2011, Mr. Schoen, who had never previously done any lobbying, registered as a lobbyist for him to set up meetings with Washington officials to discuss the political crisis in Ukraine. The meetings Mr. Schoen scheduled were almost exclusively with senior officials at Mrs. Clinton’s State Department. Mr. Schoen arranged roughly a dozen meetings with State Department officials from September 2011 to November 2012 on behalf of or with Mr. Pinchuk. At times those meetings overlapped with Mr. Pinchuk’s other involvements with the Clintons. For instance, in 2012, Mr. Pinchuk took a break from the Clinton Global Initiative to meet upstairs in a hotel suite with Melanne Verveer, a close aide to Mrs. Clinton and ambassador at large for global women’s issues at the State Department. …
He said he did talk about the anti-dumping suit with John F. Tefft and Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the former and current American ambassadors to Ukraine. In November, around the time analysts from Fitch downgraded Interpipe, citing the anti-dumping suit and the company’s missing a $106 million debt payment, Mr. Pyatt visited a new Interpipe factory in the industrial town of Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. He told reporters he was “deeply impressed” with the eco-friendly meteorological mill. …