Barack Obama to be paid $400,000 for speech at Cantor Fitzgerald event

Barack Obama is to be paid $400,000 (£312,000) to speak at a healthcare conference organised by the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, despite his criticism of the finance sector when he was US president.

The fee is nearly double that received by Hillary Clinton, who had hoped to succeed him as president, for speeches at Goldman Sachs and indicates the scale of the potential earnings of the former US president.

Neither his representatives nor Cantor Fitzgerald could be reached to comment on the reports from the US, where he is facing criticism for his decision to accept the engagement.

In 2010, Obama was credited with pushing through legislation that was intended to clamp down on Wall Street. A year earlier he said that he did not run for office to help out “a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street”.

Since the end of his second term he has started to write his memoir – he and his wife, Michelle, are reportedly receiving $60m for separate accounts – and took a holiday with the entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson.

But Obama, 55, returned to the public stage this week to speak at the University of Chicago, where he said he would support future leaders. He told the audience that economic inequality and lack of opportunity, a skewed criminal justice system and climate change must be confronted.

“All those problems are serious, they’re daunting, but they’re not insoluble. What is preventing us from tackling them and making more progress really has to do with our politics and civic life,” he said.

The Cantor Fitzgerald event is scheduled for September, with Obama being described as the keynote speaker at a lunch during the healthcare conference. The firm, which had offices in the World Trade Center and lost two-thirds of its staff in the September 11 attacks, is not known for its Democratic links: Howard Lutnick, Cantor’s chairman and chief executive, is reported to have backed Jeb Bush, the Republican who lost out to Donald Trump for the party’s presidential nomination.

Fox News, which first reported the speaking engagement, quoted Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political consultant, as saying: “He went on the attack against Wall Street and now he’s being fed by those same people he called fat cats. It’s more hypocritical than ironic.”

However, Obama is joining a long line of former senior politicians to be paid for speeches. Bill Clinton was reportedly paid $750,000 for a speech in Hong Kong to the telecoms company Ericsson. His wife, Hillary, disclosed during her presidential campaign that they had been paid more than $25m in speaking fees since January 2014.

Politico has reported that George W Bush is paid up to $175,000 for every speech while the former presidential candidate Sarah Palin is said to have received $115,000 for one speech.

UK politicians also command hefty fees for speeches. The former chancellor George Osborne – who is not standing for re-election in June – disclosed that he had received more than £500,000 from speeches in the US, including two events for JP Morgan at £81,174 and £60,578 each, last year.

In 2009 Tony Blair received £390,000 for two half-hour speeches in the Philippines, while Gordon Brown has donated fees of about £70,000 for speaking engagements to his charitable foundation.

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