In this morning’s Wall Street Journal is an interesting article by Mary Jacoby (Riga,Latvia) titled “Lobbyists’ NATO Goldmine, Lucrative Niche is Found Amid Expansion”.  I tried to post the entire article for you but it was too long and I got an error message to that affect. Anyway, below is a recap as part of the article that pretty much says it all:

“Bridge to the West
A sampling of contracts lobbyist Sally Painer helped ink after the tiny Baltic nation of Latvia joined NATO in 2004:

$ 60,000 in 2004 to lobby for Latvia’s successful bid to host a 2006 NATO summit

$383,000 in 2005 and 2006 from Parex Bank in Riga to lobby on banking issues in the U.S.

$320,000 in 2006 from AQM Strategy Corp., a Florida company looking for investment opportunities in Latvia and elsewhere

$ 75,000 in April to monitor trade issues for Liepajas Metalurgs, a Latvian steel maker

$ 5,000 a month in May for undetermined period to lobby Congress to allow Latvian citizens to visit the U.S. without visas.”

I would be interested in knowing the source of these contract monies...the only one that appears to be listed is the Parex Bank.  Because the source of this article is a stringer in Riga, it makes me wonder if the implication is that all these contracts have been made by Latvian interests?  Interesting…

Just tried looking it up, and not willing to subscribe to the online journal to get the article.  Can you tell us more?

I can post the entire article in several parts if you are interested.  LOL has a cap of 6000 words per post and apparently this one runs longer. Latvia is mentioned throughout so it might be worth a read. Look for it tomorrow. 
As for the above stats which I could not bring up on WORD because it had a picture of Sally Painter attached,the source given is the U.S. Senate lobbying disclosure records.

Here is the first part of the article.

Lobbyists’ NATO Goldmine
Lucrative Niche Is Found Amid Expansion
By MARY JACOBY
June 2, 2007; Page A4

RIGA, Latvia—The steady expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been widely touted in the West as a way to spread freedom. It also has opened a door for Washington lobbyists, who have profited by helping shape the process as it has unfolded.

As NATO has worked to integrate former Soviet republics and client states with the West, those nations have sought influential middlemen with the contacts and know-how to pull it off. The stakes are huge, offering not just military but diplomatic—and economic—opportunity.
None of the lobbyists are household names. But for Washington insiders, European officials and businesses seeking access to NATO’s new members, they have become prized contacts—while carving out a lucrative niche.
One of the most prominent, is Sally Painter, a former official in the Clinton Commerce Department who since leaving government in the mid-1990s has become a key representative for NATO’s new and aspiring members. Just last month, Ms. Painter signed contracts totaling more than $200,000 from seven of the new NATO countries, including Latvia, that are seeking to waive visa requirements for citizens traveling to the U.S.
Ms. Painter also is a key figure in organizing conferences at NATO’s annual summits, which have grown in recent years into lavish events at which foreign-policy mavens and government leaders mingle with big corporate donors. Since 1999, 10 former Soviet-orbit countries have joined the Western alliance, three have been selected to host a NATO summit.

Ms. Painter organized NATO summit events in Washington in 1999, Prague in 2002 and here in the Latvian capital last fall. Before President Bush and other NATO leaders gathered in Riga’s cobblestoned old town, she helped corral $100,000-plus donations from some of her private clients to sponsor a gala dinner and foreign-policy conference that was the main public networking event of the summit. Those clients, including a disbarred lawyer under grand-jury investigation, were rewarded for their donations to the NATO conference with a White House meeting with President Bush.
“The NATO summit made Latvia much more visible for international investors,” says Valdis Birkavs, a former Latvian prime minister.
Other well-known lobbyists who have worked with new members of NATO include Randy Scheunemann, now foreign-policy director for Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, and Paige Reffe, a former aide in the Clinton administration.
Mr. Scheunemann worked on NATO issues as a Senate aide and joined the NATO expansion committee after he left Capitol Hill in 1998 to lobby. His clients included Latvia, Georgia, Macedonia and Romania. Mr. Reffe snagged lobbying contracts with Lithuania and Slovakia after leaving the Clinton administration.
The lobbyists’ work doesn’t violate ethics rules, and is fairly common in Washington. But it does open a little-noticed window on the close interplay between the public and private sectors in Washington—and how that process is spreading from domestic policymaking to the newly open Eastern European countries.
Their efforts also show how the expansion of NATO—first formed in 1949 as a Western military alliance to counter the Soviets—has been influenced by Washington insiders well after they have left their government roles, even as its original military purpose has broadened. Several NATO lobbyists have played key roles as well on other issues, such as winning support from aspiring members for the U.S.-led Iraq invasion in 2003.
Ms. Painter says her public and private roles have complemented each other. “To join NATO, these countries had to make a lot of reforms,” she says. “Their economies grew, and there’s naturally been heightened interest from global corporations.”

After leaving the Commerce Department, Ms. Painter joined the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, a nonprofit group that advocated opening the Western military alliance to former Soviet states. There, she helped persuade Congress to embrace NATO’s growth.
In 2001, working at the Washington lobbying firm Downey McGrath Group Inc., Ms. Painter began working to help Bulgaria and Estonia enter NATO as well. She also worked for the Czech Republic in its successful NATO bid.
In February 2003, as the administration sought European allies to back an invasion of Iraq, two of Ms. Painter’s Republican allies from the Committee to Expand NATO helped circulate a letter from Latvia and other aspiring members declaring their support for toppling Saddam Hussein. In turn, the Bush administration began pushing hard within NATO to elevate their interests.
Most of the nations that signed the letter were current, past, or future clients of Ms. Painter and Messrs. Reffe and Scheunemann.
Popular in Washington, NATO expansion has proved to be an issue that cuts across party lines. Ms. Painter was slammed by congressional Republicans while in the Commerce Department for placing big Democratic donors on overseas U.S. trade missions led by her then-boss, the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown.
Even so, Ms. Painter has emerged as one of the rare former Clinton administration officials able to open doors in the Bush White House. “We’ve had a great esprit de corps,” she says of the Republicans—including Stephen Hadley, now national-security adviser—who worked with her on the committee. “That’s because it was really all about the public policy, not the partisanship.”

Here’s the end to the article.

Ms. Painter and her colleagues also have taken on as clients some businesses and officials from the new NATO countries. She signed up a Latvian bank, Parex Bank AS, which Treasury Department officials suspected was being used by some of its Russian clients for money laundering. One of Ms. Painter’s tasks was to help convince U.S. officials the bank was working to stop illegal activities. Parex says it wasn’t able to control what its clients did but now is working with the U.S. to report and detect suspicious activity and shut it down.
In 2004, Ms. Painter took her services and clients to the lobbying powerhouse Dutko Worldwide LLC, where she was put in charge of its new international consulting arm, Dutko Global Advisors. She quickly signed a $60,000 contract with Aivis Ronis, Latvia’s ambassador to the U.S., to support its effort to host the 2006 NATO summit.
Mr. Ronis hired Ms. Painter again last year to organize a gala conference that was to coincide with the Riga summit. Ms. Painter helped persuade Parex, which has paid Dutko $383,000 for lobbying, to donate $200,000 to sponsor the conference.
Another of Ms. Painter’s clients, an Orlando, Fla., investor named Frank Amodeo, contributed $100,000, on top of $320,000 he had paid Dutko to help him identify business opportunities in Latvia and elsewhere, filings and interviews show. When NATO conference donors were invited to meet Mr. Bush in October at the White House, Mr. Amodeo was seated two places away from the president.
Currently, Mr. Amodeo is under investigation by a federal grand jury in Florida in connection with millions of dollars that went missing from companies he controlled, according to people familiar with the situation. The former lawyer previously served two years in federal prison for fraud.
Through a spokesman, Mr. Amodeo declined to comment for this article. The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment on Mr. Amodeo. Ms. Painter says she was unaware of her client’s history until recently. She says Mr. Amodeo’s contract with Dutko ended in March.

Write to Mary Jacoby at