MAN WITH NO MORALS
Laid bare in our devastating series by a top investigative writer, the sickening truth about how Blair’s made MILLIONS from doing . . .
‘I want at least £3m a year — plus commission’
FOR a major new book on the former PM, top investigative reporter Tom Bower interviewed dozens of senior government officials, all the Cabinet Secretaries from the Blair years and successive junior ministers and Cabinet ministers as well as top-level military and business sources. In total, he spoke to 200 people. Today, in the third part of our exclusive series, he reveals how Blair ‘the peace envoy’ cosied up to dictators to make millions for himself.
THE FUTURE looked bright. In June 2007, Tony Blair bequeathed his premiership to Gordon Brown and began zipping about the Middle East in private jets as an official peace envoy. But he was far from content with his unpaid yet prestigious role. After all, he had never had any intention of living on his annual pension of £63,468 — and hadn’t he promised Cherie that they’d be seriously wealthy after leaving Downing Street? Jonathan Powell, his former chief of staff, came to the rescue.
Setting up a meeting with a leading headhunter, Powell told him bluntly: ‘Tony needs a job.’
In turn, the headhunter, Martin Armstrong, had a chat with Blair’s PR friend Matthew Freud, and together the men agreed that the headhunter should try the U.S. investment bank J.P. Morgan.
Armstrong’s approach was fruitful. On July 11, 2007, the bank’s chief executive met Blair at Freud’s office in Mayfair, and offered him a seat on the J.P. Morgan board.
‘You’d take over from George Shultz,’ said chief executive Jamie Dimon, referring to the ailing former U.S. Secretary of State. Blair’s annual fee, he added, would be $100,000 — about £72,000. But this failed to impress Blair. Bluntly, he told Dimon he wanted ‘ a proper job’ and expected at least £3 million a year, a five-year contract as an adviser and a percentage of every contract he initiated.
If Dimon was taken aback, he didn’t show it. Within weeks, he’d offered Blair almost all he wanted.
It was a good start — but there was one person involved who was less than thrilled: the headhunter. To Armstrong’s dismay, more than a year after helping Blair land his contract, he still hadn’t been paid the customary introductory fee from the bank.
Perhaps Blair could help, he thought. His chance came when he spotted the former PM at a 40th birthday party for Freud’s then wife Elisabeth Murdoch at her country estate in October 2008.
Approaching Blair, he introduced himself: ‘ I’m the guy who placed you with J.P. Morgan . . .’
‘Good for you,’ replied Blair, and walked quickly away.
By then, he had more important matters to contend with — such as a new deal with Zurich Insurance to advise on climate change, for a salary of about £180,000 a year.
He’d also been retained as a paid adviser by Bernard Arnault, the head of a French luxury-goods conglomerate, whom he’d once entertained at Chequers. His opportunities to make money seemed limitless . . .
Not only did Blair’s role as a Middle East peace envoy open doors, but the two charities he set up after leaving office were proving to be useful calling cards.
There was his Faith Foundation, which was meant to encourage tolerance between the religions, and his Africa Governance Initiative (AGI) — through which he hoped to advise leaders on how to run their countries.
To them, his approach was nearly always the same: using millions donated to AGI by charities or foreign government aid agencies, he’d set up a ‘delivery unit’ for them — based on a unit run by educationalist Michael Barber, that he’d created while in Downing Street.
So often did he peddle this line that Barber’s book, How To Run A Government, soon became a ‘must read’ across the developing world.
But what Blair never bothered to tell all the dictators and presidents was that the Downing Street delivery unit had not been a conspicuous success. Indeed, it had been closed down after just four years.
As well as promoting his charities, Blair also worked hard at increasing his fortune.
He maintained there was a strict line drawn between his charities and private work; but in practice this line was blurred, as was his frequent use of British embassies paid for by the taxpayer.
Take, for instance, one of his more recent ventures.
In May 2015, Blair flew to Nigeria to meet the new president, Muhammadu Buhari, on a jet chartered by Evgeny Lebedev, who owns the London Evening Standard with his father, a former KGB colonel.
After a night at the Hilton Hotel, Blair called the following morning on the British High Commissioner.
Dropping in on British embassies had by then become a familiar routine: in every country Blair visits, he expects the embassy to provide him with a comprehensive security briefing and occasionally even overnight accommodation.
But although he was advising sovereign governments in ways that could conflict with British interests, no one at Whitehall had dared to end this perk.
At the Nigerian embassy, Blair was keen to discover more about the threat posed by Boko Haram, the Islamic terror group murdering hundreds of civilians in the north of the country.
Then, armed with the classified information, he sped in a motor cavalcade to the president’s office. It was their first meeting. Blair i ntroduced himself grandly as ‘Britain’s most successful Prime Minister’ and then launched into his practised sales pitch.
‘I pioneered the skills to make government work effectively,’ he told the president. ‘The Delivery Unit is the leader’s weapon to make his government effective across the civil service and country.’
He offered to establish a delivery unit within Buhari’s government, with paid staff. But the president — a former army general and military dictator famous for imprisoning his opponents without trial — looked bored.
So did Lebedev, who had only
come along because he was interested i n Blair’s charity work fighting the Ebola virus. ‘Could you all l eave us alone now?’ Blair announced suddenly. ‘I have a personal message for the president from David Cameron.’ But it was nothing of the kind. Twenty minutes later, Buhari emerged l ooking noticeably disgruntled. Blair, he told an aide, had used his access to tout for business on behalf of his private company, Tony Blair Associates.
Without so much as a blush, he had offered to sell the president Israeli drones and other military equipment to help defeat the Boko Haram uprising. ‘Blair is just after business,’ muttered Buhari.
During the drive back to the airport, the local organiser for Blair’s AGI charity asked whether he was mixing charity and business. ‘We don’t do business in Africa,’ Blair replied.
‘Don’t worry. Only AGI and charitable work. We only do business in the Middle East and Asia.’ Two weeks later, the local AGI organiser called Buhari’s office to ask whether the president wanted to go ahead with a delivery unit. He was rebuffed.
‘The president was not happy with Blair pushing the Israeli business,’ Buhari’s office warned him.
Anyone else might have desisted; not the eternally optimistic Blair. Six weeks later, in London, he met Bukola Saraki, the president of the Nigerian senate and third most powerful person in the country.
This time, as he discussed opportunities to introduce investors from the Middle East to Nigeria, he was more successful. ‘ We’d like that,’ said Saraki — who was fully aware that Blair now also represented a wealth fund based in Abu Dhabi.
In his quest for profitable work, Blair sometimes agreed to give well-paid speeches — including an address in Orlando, Florida, to the International Sanitary Supply Association — manufacturers of l avatory cleaners. But for the most part, he concentrated on offering advice to sheikhs, presidents and dictators.
He was pushing at an open door — after all, few other people in the world could confide to potential clients that they had access to President Obama and other world leaders.
His impeccable credentials helped win him a £20 million deal with Kuwait to review the country’s economy. Selected Kuwaiti experts were hired for the project and flown to London for training.
His visitors were directed to
Kuwait paid £20m for a study they binned
conduct exhaustive research in Kuwait to identify the country’s problems. Then they were asked to visit Singapore in order to study the country’s excellent education system, and South Korea to study the health system.
Blair’s eventual report — ‘Kuwait Vision 2035’ — was greeted with derision. It was a lengthy repetition of Kuwait’s wellknown problems, concluding with a series of impractical solutions, according to critics. To save face, the country’s rulers buried the report.
Not surprisingly, Blair was discovering that trading access to earn millions of pounds could be a grubby business. U.I. Energy of South Korea wanted his help to secure an oil contract.
No matter that the company was later embroiled in a corruption scandal — Blair accepted the fee.
From another company called PetroSaudi, he was paid £41,000 a month plus 2 per cent commission on any deals he brokered with Chinese officials. It was short-lived: PetroSaudi was subsequently accused of bribing Malaysian politicians.
Another of Blair’s lucrative deals, in 2011, was with Nursultan Nazarbayev, the dictator of Kazakhstan, whom he’d once welcomed to Downing Street.
Unfortunately, soon after the ex-PM started working for him, Kazakh security forces shot dead 14 unarmed protesters and wounded 60 others. There were also reports of opponents being tortured.
‘I don’t dismiss the human rights stuff,’ said Blair, trying to justify his connection with the dictator.
‘These are points we make. There’s a whole new generation of administrators there who are reformers, and we’re working with them.’
In an hour-long video about Nazarbayev, Blair could be seen sitting happily beside him, and repeatedly eulogising him. He also arranged for his old crony Alastair Campbell and former Downing Street spokesman Tim Allan to promote the despot.
The following year, Nazarbayev asked Blair for advice about a speech he was about to make in Cambridge. How should he address the killing of the 14 civilians?
‘Tragic though they were,’ Blair wrote, ‘that should not obscure the enormous progress that Kazakhstan has made.’
While expanding his empire, Blair has also added greatly to the fortunes of his original employer, J.P. Morgan.
Back in 2010, he asked for a one-on-one meeting with the then Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan — ostensibly to offer the services of AGI and the Faith Foundation to help reconcile the country’s Muslims and Christians.
Again, he was given an intelligence briefing by the British embassy in advance. But having charmed the president and — in the words of Jonathan’s staff — satisfied his ego, Blair then introduced him to J.P. Morgan chief Jamie Dimon.
The banker offered to manage Nigeria’s sovereign wealth f und — and Jonathan agreed. No other bank in the world was asked to tender for this profitable work.
From Nigeria, Blair flew with Dimon to Liberia, where he already had a charity AGI team in place to advise the president. The upshot? J.P. Morgan invested in a commercial project in Liberia.
Then, in September 2012, Blair was asked by a banker to help Ivan Glasenberg, the chief executive of Glencore, the world’s biggest commodity trading house, to buy a rival called Xstrata.
To succeed, Glasenberg needed the support of the prime minister of Qatar, which owned nearly 12 per cent of Xstrata’s shares. So a hefty fee was agreed for Blair to introduce the pair and encourage the deal.
Although present at t heir hour-long meeting, he remained curiously silent.
Afterwards, Glasenberg wondered if Blair’s huge fee had been a waste of money.
In addition to serving bankers, Blair had many other commercial paymasters — such as Mubadala of Abu Dhabi. This was a sovereign wealth fund that reportedly invested £3.6 billion in 2013 to mine bauxite in Guinea — where Blair already had AGI staff in the president’s office. And as Mubadala started investing in Vietnam, Serbia, Colombia and West Africa, Blair was contracted to earn commissions of up to 20 per cent.
He also popped up on the advisory panel that supervised the construction of British Petroleum’s £32 billion oil pipeline from Azerba- ijan to the Mediterranean. Oddly enough, he was also paid to advise the president of Azerbaijan. In addition, his services were called in when BP was seeking new oil concessions in Abu Dhabi.
The sheikh who employed Blair privately to work for his investment fund also happened to be the head of Abu Dhabi’s Supreme Petroleum Council. And so it goes on.
Today, with his tangled web of charity and private interests, Blair remains at the centre of a bewildering number of enterprises.
By February this year, he claimed to have established a network of commercial contacts in 25 nations — in parallel with charity enterprises in 20 countries.
In the process, he had amply fulfilled his pledge to Cherie. The Blairs are now indeed seriously rich, and have so far spent more than £25 million on UK property alone. Yet, still, Tony Blair cannot resist seeking new deals.
To this day, he continues to be feted as a celebrity in destitute African countries run by corrupt leaders and dictators — the very people he pledged as Prime Minister to remove. But in the rest of the world his stock is besmirched.
His financial interests are a tangled web