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The Fragrance Foundation, a trade group for the perfume industry, paid former President Bill Clinton $260,000 to give a speech in January 2014 that lasted less than an hour.
In the months after the talk, the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation organized and partially funded an effort to get hundreds of farmers in Haiti to plant thousands of lime trees, a project designed to help both the impoverished farmers and the perfume and beverage industries, which had been hurt by a spike in lime prices caused by drought and crop blight.
The Clinton Foundation’s partner on the project was one of the world’s largest fragrance and flavoring suppliers, Firmenich International SA, along with the Swiss company’s U.S. charity. The Firmenich Charitable Foundation put up about $250,000 for the Haiti lime-tree project. Some of it went to a unit of the Clinton Foundation in Haiti and some to a charity recruited for the project that works with the Clinton Foundation in Haiti, records and interviews show.