The Clinton Foundation claims it went through a bidding process before awarding the contract to Clayton Homes, which was already embroiled in the FEMA trailer lawsuit. But despite repeated requests, the foundation has not provided The Nation with any documentation of this process.
There are hints that Clayton Homes aggressively pursued the contract....
The Clinton Foundation’s chief operating officer, Laura Graham, said in a phone interview that the contract was awarded to Clayton on the basis of a "limited request for proposals" from nine companies. She added that the decision was informed by "recommendations from a panel including a lot of these experts that do this work for a living, and Clayton was recommended as the most cost-efficient, with the best product and with the strongest Haitian partner." She clarified that she did not participate in the bidding process but said there were "representatives from the foundation as well as [the UN] Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA], the UN Special Envoy Office and the International Organization for Migration [IOM]…and there was a request for proposals run by them."
According to Bradley Mellicker, IOM’s Port-au-Prince–based emergency preparedness and response officer, however, "the Clinton Foundation paid for the containers through a no-bid process." Imogen Wall, former spokeswoman for OCHA in Haiti, responded by e-mail that OCHA never deals with procurement or project management.
The Nation made multiple attempts to reach Bill Clinton for comment. However, the former president, known for championing the role of nonprofits in global affairs ("Unlike the government, we don’t have to be quite as worried about a bad story in the newspapers," he recently said in a speech), never responded. A Clayton Homes official referred all queries regarding the contract to the Clinton Foundation.
When he heard that the new classrooms in his community had been built by a FEMA formaldehyde litigation defendant, Santos Alexis, Léogâne’s stately mayor, said, "I hope these are not the same trailers that made people sick in the US. Otherwise I would be very critical; it would be chaos." (They are indeed different trailers, according to an engineer at Clayton Homes, who said the new classrooms were constructed specifically for the Clinton Foundation’s Haiti project.)
