A late-night party at Nobu, a fashionable Japanese restaurant in Manhattan, proved merely a fishy hors d’oeuvre to the sumptuous launch of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), a bold attempt by the former president to turn his enduring celebrity and high-profile contacts into a powerful engine of change on behalf of the world’s poor.

For the 800 or so participants who paid $15,000 (about £8,300) a head for the privilege of rubbing shoulders with many of Bill’s famous friends — such as Barbra Streisand and George Soros — the occasion offered both a nostalgic return to the glory days of the Clinton presidency and a hint of another President Clinton to come.

Yet for all the speculation about Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects and her husband’s unflagging attempts to keep the family name in the spotlight, Americans were keeping their distance. The big cheques were signed by Britons or British-based entrepreneurs.

It was a tribute to Clinton’s still-magnetic political appeal that for the first session of a three-day conference, which he hopes to make an annual event, the opening speakers were Tony Blair, King Abdullah of Jordan and Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state.

Yet it was also a measure of Clinton’s limitations as a would-be catalyst for world peace that the men playing the biggest role in funding his ambitious aid initiatives came from Glasgow and London respectively.

“I think the big American donors are waiting to see where this is heading,” one conference delegate observed. “Everyone loves Bill, but maybe some of us know him too well to start giving him $100m.”

No such worries deterred Sir Tom Hunter, a Scottish entrepreneur who made his first fortune selling trainers. He announced he was funding development research projects in Africa and Latin America worth up to $100m.

Nor did doubts about Clinton’s motives trouble Mohamed Ibrahim, a London-based former BT engineer who made a fortune building telephone networks in Africa, and who also pledged $100m to an African Enterprise private investment fund.

Hunter, whose fortune is put at £678m in The Sunday Times Rich List, decided to commit to Clinton’s initiative after touring Africa on the former president’s plane earlier this year.

“Thirty hours in an aircraft with the president is pretty compelling stuff,” Hunter said. “He’s a very clever, charismatic figure and he’s got the best people in the world around him. But it wasn’t just a question of writing a cheque for $100m — a little thinking went into it.”

Hunter’s foundation intends to start with two projects in different countries in the hope of constructing a so-called “holistic” model for development that will cover everything from health and nutrition to business and development in a single aid package. However, he did add a caveat. “We will only continue to fund if certain milestones are being hit,” he said.

Despite the long list of American multi-millionaires who have made their fortunes in the digital age, it was Ibrahim, a near-unknown Sudanese-born mobile phone magnate, who shared centre stage with Hunter. Between them the two men accounted for two-thirds of the $300m pledged to Clinton’s initiative on the first day of the conference.

In his closing speech last night Clinton said he had received 191 pledges worth a total of $1.25 billion, including a $300m clean energy fund sponsored by Swiss Re, the reinsurance company based in Europe. Foreign donors appear to have accounted for the bulk of the new money pledged.

Behind the apparent hesitance of major US donors may be continuing speculation over Hillary’s presidential ambitions. Clinton’s staff have emphasised that his initiative is “scrupulously nonpartisan”, but everyone at the conference knew the junior senator for New York will be a prime candidate for the 2008 Democratic nomination if, as expected, she wins her re-election next year.

Hillary was due to participate in a session on climate change, but otherwise seemed determined to leave the limelight to her husband. Marshalling his facts with an ease George W Bush has never managed, the 59-year-old steered his guests into conversations about everything from the effect of Canadian wood imports on the US housing market to the depth of the topsoil on Argentine farms.

Yet the collision between Clinton politics and charity may remain uncomfortable for some American donors.

“Nobody doubts Bill is doing this because he thinks he can make a difference on some very important issues,” one American delegate observed. “But these are delicate times. Bush is in trouble. There’s Iraq and the mess in New Orleans. Bill wouldn’t be human if he wasn’t thinking about Hillary.”

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