Clinton Forgets to Declare $5m Family Charity

Hillary Clinton suffered an embarrassment in her campaign for the Democratic nomination yesterday after it was reported that she did not fully disclose her finances in her annual Senate ethics report.

The Washington Post reported that Ms Clinton had failed to include a family charity she operates with Bill Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea, in her report to the Senate for the last five years.

The Clintons established the charity in 2001 and have donated more than $5m (£2.54m) over the years, deducted from their taxable income. The foundation, which lists Hillary Clinton as treasurer and secretary, has given $1.25m to their church, universities, the Unicef tsunami fund, charities in the memory of Jordan's King Hussein and Israel's Yitzhak Rabin, and a women's development organisation.

The family charity is separate from the Clinton Foundation which has helped raise more than $10bn to fight Aids.

Ms Clinton's office said the failure to disclose the existence of the foundation to the Senate was an oversight and had been corrected immediately on learning of the omission from the Post. "The details of the Clintons' charitable family foundation and Senator Clinton's role in it have always been publicly available but, in an oversight that leaders of both parties have made, it was inadvertently omitted from her Senate filing, which has been corrected," a spokesman, Philippe Reines, was quoted as telling the newspaper.

Ms Clinton is not the first high profile leader to be confronted with such a lapse. The house speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was also forced to amend her disclosure report.

The lapse could provide ammunition to opponents in the race for the Democratic nomination in 2008. "She is in the spotlight, a very bright spotlight, and every little omission will be scrutinised by the media and her political opponents," said Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the Centre for Responsive Politics, an independent monitor of campaign finance.