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McCain 'Trailblazer' Burned

The F.C.C. hits James Courter's IDT with a $1.3M fine for a cloudy deal in Haiti.
James Courter
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(Editor's Note: This story has been changed from the version originally posted to clarify the attribution of some information.)

 
IDT, the New Jersey telecommunications outfit run by one of John McCain's top fundraisers, Jim Courter, was fined $1.3 million by the Federal Communications Commission for failing to file a contract for telephone service to Haiti in 2004.
 
Its work with Haiti has been put under scrutiny since a former employee, Michael Jewett, then IDT's manager for the Caribbean, sued the company. His suit claims he was fired when he balked at negotiating a scheme that routed a portion of the company's long distance revenue from Haiti calls to a company for the benefit of then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
 
Jewett's suit alleges that the deal cut IDT's long-distance payments to Haiti to 8.75 cents a minute, from 23 cents, the legal tariff, which mainline U.S. carriers such as AT&T were paying.
 
Payments went to an offshore company, Mount Salem in the Turks & Caicos, which sent 3 cents to Aristide and the rest to the Haiti telecommunications company, according to a lawsuit filed by the Haitian government against its former president and his associates.
 
Courter, a former New Jersey Republican congressman, is one of 20 McCain national finance co-chairs, and joined the campaign in February 2007. He's a "Trailblazer" for McCain, meaning he raised at least $100,000. The IDT PAC has contributed $84,850 in 2008.

The F.C.C. said IDT had violated the law by "willfully and repeatedly" failing to file its Haiti agreements regarding rates and other matters.

The filings were required under the commission's International Settlements Policy, which called for the same best rates for all U.S. carriers. The goal was to ensure "a competitive playing field" and prevent dominant carriers on the foreign end of a U.S.-international route from leveraging their market power to the detriment of U.S. carriers and consumers.

IDT had had its share of run-ins with regulators even before the F.C.C. fine handed down Wednesday. Jewett's allegations are also being investigated by the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the company's filings with the S.E.C. The I.R.S. is also reportedly looking at the company, according to published reports.

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