There’s a lot of corruption out there, since top political positions command power, prestige, and $money$, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised in the lead-off item in AL Monitor’s email reporting on lobbying:
US lobbying emerges as key issue in Tunisian presidential election
Revelations first published Wednesday by Al-Monitor have caused an uproar in the upcoming Tunisian presidential election. Al-Monitor reported that an emissary for Tunisian presidential candidate Nabil Karoui had signed a $1 million lobbying contract for US and international help getting elected. Rivals of the media mogul, who is already in jail on unrelated money laundering charges, are demanding that he be disqualified from the Oct. 13 presidential runoff between him and conservative lawyer Kais Saied. One rival, the Democratic Current party, filed a criminal complaint Thursday, calling the contract with Canadian firm Dickens & Madson (Canada) a criminal act. A spokeswoman for the Tunis Court of First Instance today announced the opening of an investigation.
Karoui denies any knowledge of the Aug. 19 contract or the person who signed it, one Mohamed Bouderbala. The contract calls on firm President Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence operative and arms dealer, to lobby the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations in view of “attaining the presidency of the Republic of Tunisia.” Ben-Menashe is tasked with striving to “arrange meetings” with US President Donald Trump and other senior US officials ahead of the Tunisian election. The contract also calls on the firm to seek a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to obtain “material support for the push for the presidency.” In a filing with the Justice Department this week, the firm said it received an initial payment of $250,000 around Sept. 25 from Karoui.
AL Monitor has an article with more information. This I found particularly interesting:
The complaint also mentions Ennahda party, which has retained Burson-Marsteller (now BCW) for public affairs work in the United States since 2014, as well as parliamentary candidate Olfa Terras-Rambourg, who retained Washington firm America to Africa Consulting in early September.
Jaouhar Ben Mbarek, a Tunisian constitutional law professor, concurred in a post on Facebook. “This can be considered foreign support and funding for Karoui’s election campaign, which is in breach of Tunisia’s electoral law,” he wrote. “This should lead to the disqualification of the candidate and of his party’s lists.”
A list appears to be the list of party-approved candidates, provided to make party-line voting an easier task. It’s fascinating that Professor Mbarek suggests that not only should candidate Karoui be disqualified, but so should all listed candidates. It’s sort of a death penalty, if only temporary.
But it’s really part of the age-old story: the lust for gold and power, and the hell with the effect of the outcome on society. I wonder if they took the page directly out of Trump’s book.
