Lawsuit details link between Clintons, longtime benefactor

NEW YORK -- When former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton took a family vacation in January 2002 to Acapulco, Mexico, one of their longtime supporters, Vinod Gupta, provided his company's private jet to fly them there.

The company, InfoUSA, one of the nation's largest brokers of information on consumers, paid $146,866 to ferry the Clintons, Gupta, and others to Acapulco and back, court records show. During the next four years, InfoUSA paid Bill Clinton more than $2 million for consulting services, and spent almost $900,000 to fly him around the world for his presidential foundation work and to fly Senator Clinton to campaign events.

Those expenses are cited in a lawsuit filed late last year in a Delaware court by angry shareholders of InfoUSA, who assert that Gupta wasted the company's money trying "to ingratiate himself" with his high-profile guests.

The disclosure of the trips and the consulting fees is just a small part of a broader complaint about the way Gupta has managed his company. But for the former president, and for the senator who would become president, it offers significant new details about their relationship with an unusually generous benefactor whose business practices have lately come under scrutiny.

In addition to the shareholder accusations, an investigation by the authorities in Iowa found that InfoUSA sold consumer data several years ago to suspected criminals who used it to steal money from elderly consumers.

It advertised call lists with titles like "Elderly Opportunity Seekers" or "Suffering Seniors," a compilation of people with cancer or Alzheimer's disease. The company called the episodes an aberration and pledged that it would not happen again.

Asked to describe the former president's consulting services, an InfoUSA official said they were limited to making appearances at one or two company events each year. Jay Carson, a spokesman for Clinton, would not elaborate on what the former president does for InfoUSA, but said that he shared the public's concern about misuse of personal information.

"It goes without saying that any suggestion that seniors are being preyed upon should be fully investigated and addressed by the appropriate agencies," Carson said.

Aides to Senator Clinton were at pains to distance her from InfoUSA, pointing out that she had sponsored legislation that would strengthen privacy rights of consumers. As for the flights on InfoUSA's plane, Phil Singer, Clinton's spokesman, said the senator "complied with all the relevant ethics rules" on accepting private air travel.

Ethics rules for senators and candidates require only that the recipient of a flight make reimbursement at a rate equal to that of a first-class ticket -- a loophole that allows special interests to provide de facto gifts of expensive private air travel, which generally costs far more than commercial fares. Singer would not say what Clinton paid for her flights.