The smell of corruption around Tony Blair’s Brexit bashing friend — and their joint links to a brutal dictator
LAST Saturday, in conditions of unashamed luxury they are now so familiar with, Tony and Cherie Blair paid a fleeting visit to the small Mediterranean island of Malta. Driven in a blacked-out Mercedes, and accompanied by more fat-necked bodyguards than employed by a typical Third World dictator, the couple headed to Valletta, capital of the sunny tax haven, to visit St John’s, a famous Baroque cathedral full of historic art.
They then returned to the air-conditioned limousine and drove inland to Mdina, where their entourage strolled ancient city walls and attended evening mass.
Sightseeing completed, the Blairs ended their day in style: a cosy dinner with Malta’s young Labour Prime Minister, Joseph Muscat, and his glamorous wife, Michelle.
This occasion was recorded for posterity on Twitter, where 43-year-old Muscat shared a group photo, saying: ‘It was a pleasure hosting Tony and Cherie Blair and sharing so many insights with them.’
Thanks to Tony’s Hollywood smile, and Cherie’s awkward grimace, the image was another to add to the collection of Blair summer photos — alongside those with disgraced Italian Silvio Berlusconi and various other international tycoons.
Yet that wasn’t the only reason the photograph made headlines.
For, to conspiracy- minded Eurosceptics back home, it provided yet more evidence that Blair is on manoeuvres to thwart Brexit. Why so? Well, the Maltese PM is vehemently opposed to the UK leaving the EU, intends to do all he can to prevent it happening, and last month made headlines by saying in an interview that he was ‘seeing encouraging signs’ that ‘Brexit will not happen’.
Muscat’s comments appeared part of a co- ordinated PR offensive: at almost exactly the same time, a host of Remainer politicians came out with startlingly similar statements, including Blair — who said public opinion is ‘ moving’ in a way that makes him ‘think it’s possible now that Brexit does not happen’.
Fast forward to this week, and our 64-year- old former PM went to extraordinary lengths to hold that Mediterranean rendezvous with his anti-Brexit soulmate — flying to Malta from Italy (where he and Cherie, 62, had been holidaying) for a stay that lasted less than 24 hours. With the BBC running extended interviews about his life and times in recent days, Blair’s grubby fingers have also been detected in the wave of calls for the launch of a new ‘centrist’ political party dedicated to overturning Brexit.
Fascinatingly, however, the EU isn’t the only subject that he and Muscat may have been discussing.
For both share a long-standing and at times unedifying interest in the wealthy, but morally bankrupt, dictatorship of Azerbaijan.
Blair, who has devoted much of his post-Number 10 career to enriching himself via consultancy work for corrupt and repressive autocrats, made a lucrative visit to the country — once part of the Soviet Union — in 2009, shortly after leaving office.
There he met Ilham Aliyev, a kleptocratic despot notorious for human rights abuses who became the country’s leader in 2003.
It was a major PR coup for a regime that has rigged elections, jailed opponents, closed opposition news outlets, threatened dissidents with torture and rape, and has vastly enriched the Aliyev family.
Blair was paid to speak at a factory owned by a leading industrialist close to the regime, sparking outrage from opposition groups (who called for him to return his reported £90,000 fee) and sharp criticism from Amnesty International. In 2014, Blair signed a lucrative deal to lobby on behalf of private oil companies wishing to build a 2,000-mile gas pipeline between Azerbaijan and Southern Europe.
The deal was backed by the Aliyev regime, whose members stood to enrich themselves. Outraged environmentalists and democracy campaigners called Mr Blair’s involvement ‘shameful’.
As for Muscat, his relationship with Azerbaijan has, if anything, been even more controversial.
The fact is that the Maltese PM is at the centre of a major political scandal involving allegations of bribery, corruption, moneylaundering and tax evasion by some of Malta’s most powerful figures.
As a result, five official investigations have been launched by Maltese magistrates, one of which is digging into the financial affairs of Muscat and his wife.
Central to the affair is the Panama Papers scandal last year, in which 11 million files were leaked from a law firm, Mossack Fonseca, which specialises in helping rich people hide assets from tax authorities.
The documents revealed two of Muscat’s senior allies, then energy minister Konrad Mizzi and chief-ofstaff Keith Schembri, had each used the firm to set up two mysterious corporate entities in Panama.
At the time, Malta’s centre-right opposition Nationalist Party called — albeit unsuccessfully — for both men to be sacked. Muscat stood by them and for a time it looked like the grubby scandal might be forgotten. But then it exploded again in April this year.
An influential political blogger called Daphne Caruana Galizia, who has close links to the Maltese opposition, published a series of damning articles about the affair.
First, she claimed Muscat’s wife is secretly a shareholder in a third company — very similar to the two set up by Mizzi and Schembri — named in the Panama Papers.
Then, she alleged all three of these firms had been established to launder money corruptly channelled to their beneficiaries from Azerbaijan.
According to Galizia — whose claims, it should be stressed, have always been vigorously denied — Prime Minister Muscat and his allies received the cash by way of kickbacks from Azerbaijani ruler Aliyev and his
Blair now says it’s possible Brexit won’t happen
associates. They were paid, she alleged, in return for handing Azerbaijan’s state energy companies’ lucrative business concessions in Malta. These are said to have included an 18-year deal (signed in 2014) for the country to supply Malta’s gas — and a second agreement to help build a new power station.
Among other things, Galizia claimed that the Azerbaijani leader’s daughter, Leyla, used a bank in Dubai to transfer more than a million euros to the firm allegedly belonging to Muscat’s wife (Muscat and his wife deny receiving payments or having any connection to the company).
On her website, Galizia published a photo of Leyla Aliyeva and Michelle Muscat holding a chummy meeting in early 2014.
She also revealed that Malta’s PM visited Azerbaijan later that year, when the business deals in question were being discussed, with both Muscat’s chief- of- staff Schembri and the then energy minister Mizzi. No members of the Press or diplomatic staff were invited, in an apparent effort to keep proceedings under wraps.
The trip happened just months after Muscat had sent an obsequious letter to the country’s despot offering ‘ congratulations’ on having just won a rigged election. Crucially, Galizia alleged that documents that would prove her claims about kickbacks were held in a safe at the headquarters of Pilatus, a Maltese bank.
Late at night on April 20, the day Galizia had published her claims, the plot thickened when reporters from an organisation called Net News were tipped off that lights were on at the bank’s HQ.
The newsmen filmed a man later identified as Seyed Ali Sadr, the bank’s chairman, emerging from a side door. In his arms were several heavy bags. Galizia believes that these contained the damning documents.
The bank, which denies wrongdoing, says Sadr was merely preparing for a board meeting and the bags contained luggage from a business trip. It denies that the Muscats were clients.
In another surreal twist, a yet unnamed whistleblower, reported to be a Russian woman who previously worked as personal assistant to one of the bank’s senior executives, then came forward. She is said to have seen the documents in question and for a time co-operated with investigators.
However, the woman, who has been accused of fraud by the bank in the past, recently vanished from Malta and is now believed to have returned home to Russia.
Fallout from the scandal has so far seen thousands of opposition activists take to the streets demanding the resignation of the Prime Minister.
Thus the decision for separate investigations to be launched by Maltese magistrates.
For his part, Muscat claims the allegations against him are ‘ the biggest political lie ever told in this country’. He believes he is the victim of a campaign orchestrated by his enemies, and his office has called the affair a ‘politically motivated attack’.
Be that as it may, the controversy has sparked fierce criticism within the European Parliament, with German MEP Manfred Weber saying: ‘It’s time for a new leadership of Malta.’ Meanwhile, Werner Langen MEP, who is chairing the European Parliament’s inquiry into the Panama Papers affair, has accused Maltese officials of ‘total disdain’ for refusing to give evidence to his committee.
The scandal has also thrown awkward light on Malta’s status as a haven for dirty cash, with weak laws that allow tax- dodging corporations and foreign oligarchs to exploit the island’s EU membership and deposit money there. No wonder the opposition Nationalist Party leader Simon Busuttil has said Malta is facing an ‘unprecedented political and constitutional crisis’.
Nonetheless, Muscat squeaked home in the election in June (taking 55 per cent of the vote) and promptly re-appointed the two aides who’d been linked to the Panama papers to key positions: Schembri as his chief-of-staff and Mizzi to a top job in his cabinet — demonstrating his confidence in their innocence.
An important propaganda tool during that election campaign was a video endorsement in which a well- known international ‘statesman’ addressed voters over an uplifting soundtrack of violin music, declaring, ‘ I’ve known Prime Minister Joseph Muscat for some considerable time’ and describing him as ‘a great example of what a progressive politician can do in power for the people’.
The name of that ‘statesman’? Tony Blair.
Tax-dodgers and oligarchs exploit Malta’s EU status