With
Juan Guaidó’s parallel government attempting to take power with
the backing of the U.S., it is telling that the top political donors
of those in the U.S. most fervently pushing regime change in
Venezuela have close ties to Monsanto and major financial stakes in
Bayer.
by
Whitney Webb
Part
4 - Why is a top to Marco Rubio increasing his stake in Bayer while
others flee?
Yet, it
is AEI’s top individual donor noted in the accidental “schedule
of contributors” disclosure who is most telling about the private
biotech interests guiding the Trump administration’s Venezuela
policy. Paul Singer, the controversial billionaire hedge fund
manager, has long been a major donor to neoconservative and Zionist
causes — helping fund the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the
successor to the Project for a New American Century (PNAC); and the
neoconservative and islamophobic Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies (FDD), in addition to the AEI.
Singer
is notably one of the top political donors to Senator Marco Rubio
(R-FL) and has been intimately involved in the recent chaos in
Venezuela. He has been called one of the architects of the
administration’s current regime-change policy, and was the top
donor to Rubio’s presidential campaign, as well as a key figure
behind the controversial “dossier” on Donald Trump that was
compiled by Fusion GPS. Indeed, Singer had been the first person to
hire Fusion GPS to do “opposition research” on Trump. However,
Singer has largely since evaded much scrutiny for his role in the
dossier’s creation, likely because he became a key donor to Trump
following his election win in 2016, giving $1 million to Trump’s
inauguration fund.
Singer
has a storied history in South America, though he has been relatively
quiet about Venezuela. However, a long-time manager of Singer’s
hedge fund, Jay Newman, recently told Bloomberg
that a Guaidó-led government would recognize that foreign creditors
“aren’t the enemy,” and hinted that Newman
himself was weighing whether to join a growing “list of
bond veterans [that have] already begun staking out positions,
anticipating a $60 billion debt restructuring once the U.S.-backed
Guaidó manages to oust President Nicolas Maduro and take control.”
In addition, the Washington Free Beacon, which is largely funded by
Singer, has been a vocal advocate for the Trump administration’s
regime-change policy in Venezuela.
Beyond
that, Singer’s Elliott Management Corporation gave Roger Noriega,
the former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere
affairs under Bush, $60,000 in 2007 to lobby on the issue of
sovereign debt and for “federal advocacy on behalf of U.S.
investors in Latin America.” During the time Noriega was on
Singer’s payroll, he wrote articles linking Argentina and Venezuela
to Iran’s nonexistent nuclear program. At the time, Singer was
aggressively pursuing the government of Argentina in an effort to
obtain more money from the country’s prior default on its sovereign
debt.
While
Singer has been mum himself on Venezuela, he has been making business
decisions that have raised eyebrows, such as significantly increasing
his stake in Bayer. This move seems at odds with Bayer’s financial
troubles, a direct result of the slew of court cases regarding the
link between Monsanto’s glyphosate and cancer. The first ruling
that signaled trouble for Monsanto and its new parent company Bayer
took place last August, but Singer increased his stake in the company
starting last December, even though it was already clear by then that
Bayer’s financial troubles in relation to the glyphosate court
cases were only beginning.
Since
the year began, Bayer’s problems with the Monsanto merger have only
worsened, with Bayer’s CEO recently stating that the lawsuits had
“massively affected” the company’s stock prices and
financial performance.
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