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How the disgraced James Riady, barred from travel to the U.S., made it back

By Andrew Higgins
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 5, 2010; C01



JAKARTA, INDONESIA -- In March 2004, James Riady, an Indonesian tycoon and devout Christian, received an honorary doctorate from Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas. The university -- which has a scholarship program funded by the Indonesian -- didn't announce the honor. Nor did Riady pick up the diploma in person: He'd been barred from America after pleading guilty in 2001 to a "conspiracy to defraud the United States" through illegal contributions to the campaigns of Bill Clinton and other Democrats.

Last year, however, the Indonesian mogul finally made it to Arkansas. He traveled there during the first of two previously unreported trips he made in 2009 to the United States. He was allowed in only after receiving a waiver from a rule that forbids entry to foreigners guilty of "a crime involving moral turpitude," a term that government lawyers generally interpret to include fraud.

Riady's return to the United States poses a prickly question for Hillary Clinton's State Department: How and why did a foreign billionaire stained by Clinton-era scandals get a U.S. visa after being kept out for so long under the Bush administration?

The ethnic Chinese magnate's ties to the Clintons have been a source of heated controversy since the late 1990s, when Riady became embroiled in one of the murkiest episodes of the Clinton presidency -- a campaign fundraising scandal that caused a big political ruckus in Washington amid Republican Party allegations, never proved, of meddling by China's intelligence services in American politics.

The saga brought Riady and his family-run conglomerate, Lippo Group, an $8.6 million fine, the biggest penalty in the history of U.S. campaign finance violations.

A close look at Riady's quiet American comeback, along with dramas back home in Indonesia that preceded it, reveals how one of Asia's best-known and most complicated businessmen has deployed a potent mix of faith, chutzpah and charity in a long quest for rehabilitation. It also reveals a man beset by contradictions -- a dedicated student of the Bible who has a reputation in Indonesia for showing scant forgiveness to those who cross him; a generous philanthropist whose Lippo Group is notorious in Jakarta business circles for its raw pursuit of profit; a proud man who was humiliated by his entanglement with the Clintons but who has now sought to reenter their world.

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