Bill Clinton's Business Ties Face Scrutiny

Last June, Bill Clinton took a break from helping his wife run for president to take care of some business of his own. He jetted off to the Black Sea resort of Yalta for an international conference sponsored by one of his good friends: Victor Pinchuk, a billionaire steel magnate and one of the richest men in Ukraine. In recent years, Pinchuk has become a fixture in Clinton's world, in part because Pinchuk has contributed millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, the former president's charity that fights AIDS and poverty. Pinchuk's generosity paid dividends. He was a guest at the inauguration of Clinton's presidential library in Little Rock, and he attended Clinton's exclusive 60th birthday bash in New York.

Pinchuk won an even bigger favor when Clinton agreed to speak at the Yalta conference. Clinton dazzled the audience with a powerful address about the global challenges facing Ukraine. But he also inadvertently caused a stir when he was embraced by Pinchuk's father-in-law, Ukraine's former president Leonid Kuchma, whose authoritarian rule had been condemned by the State Department. Three years ago, a Ukrainian government investigation linked Kuchma's regime to the decapitation in 2000 of dissident journalist Georgy Gongadze. When Gongadze's widow, Myroslava, saw a newspaper photo of Clinton and Kuchma at the conference, "I wanted to throw up," she told NEWSWEEK. Clinton, she says, was being used by Pinchuk "to clean up and legitimize Kuchma's legacy." (A Clinton spokesman declined to comment on the ex-president's encounter with Kuchma.)

If Hillary Clinton had been seen with a discredited former autocrat, it would have made front pages across the country. But Bill's Yalta visit went unnoticed outside Ukraine. The trip illustrates the unusual position the former president is in. He is his wife's top political adviser, and Hillary does little to downplay the idea that he would be a notable, if unofficial, presence in her administration. In speeches, she says that she would deploy her husband as a roving ambassador. Yet unlike Hillary, who must report the names of her campaign contributors and how much they give, Bill Clinton is a private citizen and does not have to disclose most details about his charitable and business ventures. His private dealings raise inevitable questions about who might come seeking favors if he and Hillary move back into the White House.