The Clinton Foundation is accepting a major donation from a Moroccan government-owned company to hold a high-profile conference next month in Marrakech with the king of Morocco — an event likely to reignite concerns about the foundation’s acceptance of foreign money just as Hillary Clinton prepares to announce her presidential candidacy.

Clinton had been scheduled to appear at the meeting in Marrakech, dubbed the Clinton Global Initiative Middle East and Africa Meeting, on May 5-7. But an official with the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation told POLITICO it’s “unlikely” the former secretary of state will join her husband, Bill. He is still expected at the event, as is Moroccan King Mohammed VI.


The event is being funded largely by a contribution of at least $1 million from OCP, a phosphate exporter owned by Morocco’s constitutional monarchy, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the event.

When Hillary Clinton announced the Marrakech meeting in September, she praised Morocco as “a vital hub for economic and cultural exchange” in a region “in the midst of dramatic changes.”

But in 2011, Clinton’s State Department had accused the Moroccan government of “ arbitrary arrests and corruption in all branches of government.” And while the country that same year enacted a new constitution that guarantees gender equality, women’s rights advocates say Morocco’s family law still falls short of that promise.

While Clinton is the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic nomination, her nascent candidacy has been plagued by criticism surrounding her family foundation’s acceptance of contributions from foreign governments and companies in countries with spotty human rights records and business before the U.S. government.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who this week declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, has blasted foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation as “ thinly veiled bribes,” and called on Hillary Clinton to return any donations from Saudi Arabia or other countries that abuse the rights of women.

The aim of Clinton Global Initiative events is to connect government and nonprofit leaders with deep-pocketed benefactors to address problems plaguing the host areas. The Clinton Foundation is expected to announce additional sponsors for the Marrakech event when it formally announces the meeting lineup in the coming days. But its preliminary list of expected attendees includes executives from OCP and Coca-Cola, as well as the presidents of Rwanda and Tanzania and senior officials from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and the League of Arab States. Former Israeli President Shimon Peres is also on the list.

Before Clinton’s confirmation as secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation agreed at the urging of President Barack Obama’s transition team to require an ethics review of new foreign donations and to suspend the initiative’s foreign conferences during her tenure at Foggy Bottom. That was among the most contentious issues negotiated between the two camps, sources familiar with the discussions said, and the foundation later acknowledged that a $500,000 donation from the Algerian government may have run afoul of the agreement.

Clinton Global Initiative restarted its foreign meetings months after Clinton stepped down as secretary of state in February 2013, holding a meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in December 2013. It also resumed accepting new foreign donations.

After Paul and other Republicans complained that the foreign donations pose a serious conflict of interest, foundation officials vowed to re-impose ethics restrictions like those from Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department if she runs for president.

Yet, the meetings in Marrakech and a “CGI Mediterranean” meeting set for Athens later in the year appear to conflict with such limits. Either new restrictions on the foundation will be weaker in some respects than those in place during her State Department service, or they will have an exception for previously announced events like those in Morocco and Greece. Or those events will have to be canceled, which seems unlikely.

Asked about the application of the restrictions to scheduled events, a Clinton Foundation official said only “This CGI meeting [in Marrakech] will happen as scheduled.” The Athens session is also expected to go forward, the official added.

The Marrakech meeting will be the first for the Clinton Global Initiative in the Middle East or Africa. And the people planning it at have been working closely with representatives of King Mohammed VI, and Bill and Hillary Clinton’s offices at the foundation, according to sources with direct knowledge of the planning. They say that internal planning memos circulating among foundation staff for months have called for appearances by both Clintons, as well as potentially their daughter, Chelsea. A foundation job posting seeking temporary employees to work with the event’s sponsors indicates that “President Clinton, Secretary Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton will host” the meeting.

“When the foreign government donation news started, I was actually really surprised that they didn’t try to find another source of funding for it,” said one source with knowledge of the foundation’s inner workings. “It just seems like really bad optics. But they were like ‘why would we turn this money down? She’s not secretary of state now.’”

Jordana Merran, a spokeswoman for the Moroccan American Center for Policy, a nonprofit funded by the Moroccan government, disagreed that the event might cause a problem for Clinton.

“Frankly, I think it’s great to show support for our allies, and a country that is not only stable, but that is progressing and moving forward in a very difficult region,” said Merran, whose group is not involved in planning the conference. “Morocco isn’t perfect, but Hillary, when she was secretary of state, and countless other former and current officials and observers alike have recognized that Morocco is committed to reform and is moving in the right direction.”

Morocco was ranked 130 out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2015 World Press Freedom Index. The group last month reported that “ media freedom has been in retreat in the past few months in Morocco, as the kingdom’s authorities have cracked down on journalists,” citing the deportation of two French journalists who were reporting on the economic and social situation there.

During her State Department tenure, Clinton visited Morocco, and later launched an ongoing U.S.-Morocco strategic dialogue (the latest installment of which is set to occur in Washington this week), praising the country in 2012 “as a leader and a model.”

While she told King Mohammed that he “deserves great credit” for the work he’d undertaken, she stressed that the country needed “to take on the deeply troubling problem of child marriage” and promised aid “to help provide Moroccan youth with alternatives to criminal and extremist organizations.”

In addition, she expressed a desire “to increase the amount of trade coming to the United States, and also to improve economic integration across North Africa, which could greatly benefit Morocco because of Morocco’s stability and Morocco’s very strong economic foundation.”

That dovetails with the goal of the Clinton Global Initiative meeting, which will focus on expanding access to agricultural financing, as well as energy, water, food and infrastructure, and on harnessing youth and female entrepreneurship, according to a preliminary agenda.

It also jibes with the goals of the global initiative’s main sponsor OCP, one of Morocco’s biggest employers, which hopes to export more fertilizer to African countries to help increase crop production.

The company was connected with the Clinton Foundation by longtime Clinton supporter Stuart Eizenstat, a senior counsel at the powerhouse law firm Covington & Burling LLP, which represents OCP in Washington.

“The Clinton Global Initiative was already involved in a number of agricultural activities, but in different countries than the ones OCP is interested in,” said Eizenstat, a major Democratic donor who maxed out to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and also gave as much as $5,000 to the Clinton Foundation. “And it just occurred to me that they’re working generally in the same space to try to improve crop yields to try to help nutrition for poor Africans, and so I got the two of them together. I was not present at the meeting, but I helped arrange it.”

During Clinton’s State Department years, OCP, which was formerly called the Office Chérifien des Phosphates, paid a Covington team led by Eizenstat $760,000 to lobby Congress and federal agencies – including the State Department – according to Senate lobbying filings.

The filings don’t identify specific issues on which Eizenstat’s team lobbied, instead indicating a general mission of “Promoting economic integration in the Maghreb and enhanced economic relations between the Maghreb and the United States.” The Maghreb is the region of Northwest Africa that is home to Morocco and neighboring countries.

Eizenstat praised OCP, calling it “clean as a whistle. They are an absolutely world class company.”

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