To be fair, Putin has taken an active — and controversial — interest in such animal-kingdom giants as polar bears, snow leopards and Siberian cranes, but not elephants.
All the same, while it might not have been very good for its sponsors, the speech certainly garnered the prize some beneficial publicity and controversial interest.
The DSCC Joint Fundraising Committees raised another $310,000 from these controversial business interests.
A bank controlled by a major Tory donor has made a £115m profit by offloading its controversial high-interest loan company.
In part, it takes aim at the controversial "carried interest" income, or the profits that hedge fund managers and other big investors take home as part of their pay.
Durand has always maintained costs would be subsidised from the proceeds of its controversial London business interests [pdf].
With colleagues on the green benches happy to take that risk there seems little prospect of a shadow cabinet return, leaving Mr Clarke more time to devote to his controversial tobacco industry interests.
When Dick Cheney ran Halliburton, the controversial company with interests in oil industry services, he famously remarked that it was unfortunate that the good lord did not place all the world's oil beneath the soil of democratic countries.
In 2012, the Kochs paid for Facebook ads attacking what they called the "deceptions" of David Sassoon, the founder and publisher of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Web site InsideClimate News, because the Kochs took umbrage at his site's coverage of their controversial Canadian oil interests.
