Former US president Bill Clinton and Petra Nemcova attend the Happy Hearts Fund Gala in New York last year. Photo: Getty

New York: To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Petra Nemcova, a Czech model who survived the disaster by clinging to a palm tree, decided to pull out all the stops for the annual fundraiser of her school-building charity, the Happy Hearts Fund.

She booked Cipriani 42nd Street, a luxury restaurant in Manhattan, which greeted guests with Bellini cocktails on silver trays. She flew in Sheryl Crow with her band and crew for a 20-minute set. She special-ordered heart-shaped floral centrepieces, and heart-shaped chocolate parfait.

The gala cost $US363,413 ($475,444). But the real splurge? Bill Clinton.

The former president of the United States agreed to accept a lifetime achievement award at the June 2014 event after Ms Nemcova offered a $US500,000 contribution to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The donation, made late last year after the foundation sent the charity an invoice, amounted to almost a quarter of the evening's net proceeds – enough to build 10 preschools in Indonesia.

Advertisement

Happy Hearts' former executive director believes the transaction was a quid pro quo, which rerouted donations intended for a small charity with the concrete mission of rebuilding schools after natural disasters to a large foundation with a broader agenda and a budget 100 times bigger.

"The Clinton Foundation had rejected the Happy Hearts Fund invitation more than once, until there was a thinly veiled solicitation and then the offer of an honorarium," said the former executive director, Sue Veres Royal, who held that position at the time of the gala and was dismissed a few weeks later amid conflicts over the gala and other issues.

Press officers for Ms Nemcova and the Clinton Foundation said on Thursday that the foundation had not solicited the donation and that the money would be used for projects in Haiti, as yet undetermined.

Never publicly disclosed, the episode provides a window into the way the Clinton Foundation relies on the Clintons' prestige to amass donors large and small, offering the prospect, as described in the foundation's annual report, of lucrative global connections and participation in a worldwide mission to "unlock human potential" through "the power of creative collaboration".

"This is primarily a small but telling example of the way the Clintons operate," said Doug White, who directs the master's program in fundraising management at Columbia University. "The model has responsibility; she paid a high price for a feel-good moment with Bill Clinton. But he was riding the back of this small charity for what? A half-million bucks? I find it – what would be the word? - distasteful."

Happy Hearts Fund first asked Mr Clinton to be its honoree in 2011. Trying again in 2013, Ms Nemcova sent her first formal letter of invitation in July, asking Mr Clinton to be the primary award recipient at a Happy Hearts gala on November 4, 2013, celebrating Indonesia.

Mr Clinton's scheduler replied with a cordial rejection – "Regrettably, he is committed to another event out of town that same evening" – in an email copied to Frank Giustra, the Canadian mining financier who is one of the Clinton Foundation's largest donors and also a supporter of Ms Nemcova.

Ms Nemcova then met officers at the Clinton Foundation, Ms Veres Royal said. Afterwards, she said, "Petra called me and said we have to include an honorarium for him – that they don't look at these things unless money is offered, and it has to be $500,000."

The invitation letter was revised and sent again at the end of August. It moved the gala to 2014, offered to work around Mr Clinton's schedule, dropped the focus on Indonesia and shifted it to Haiti, and proposed the donation.

In the end, the Happy Hearts Fund's gala was a star-studded event, with celebrities including Naomi Watts and John Legend and the models Karlie Kloss and Coco Rocha in attendance. The Haitian president, Michel Martelly, a former musician who was Ms Nemcova's boyfriend's boss at the time, was a second honoree, and he performed a couple of numbers with Wyclef Jean.

Outside the restaurant, about 100 protesters, mostly Haitian-Americans expressing frustration with the earthquake reconstruction effort, stood behind barricades holding protest signs.

"Clinton, where is the money?" they chanted. "In whose pockets?"

New York Times