Web of firms that kept his huge deals with despots secret

During a recent major interview, Tony Blair was asked about a subject very close to his heart: money. ‘Am i better off than most people? Yeah, i’m very lucky,’ he told the uS title newsweek. ‘Am i in the league of the super-rich? Absolutely not, though you will have to make up your own mind about that.’

it was a similar story back in 2014, when the prolific private-jet traveller used a speech in London to discuss the wealth his murky post-Downing Street career had generated.

‘i read that i am supposed to be worth £100m,’ he declared. ‘Cherie is kind of asking where it is! i’m not worth a half of that, a third of that, a quarter of that, a fifth of that… i could go on!’

Our former Prime Minister has of course always been a pretty straight kind of guy. But to a casual reader, the remarks seemed at best odd and at worst downright delusional. After all, his known property holdings alone were, at the time, worth north of £30 million.

Then there were Blair’s extensive earnings from advisory roles with the Swiss insurance giant Zurich international and uS investment bank JP Morgan, not to mention the £250,000-a-pop he occasionally trousered from speaking engagements.

Yet all these paled into insignificance next to the piles of money generated by Tony Blair Associates [TBA], his highlysecretive company which has in recent years provided consultancy and lobbying services to a string of companies and dictatorships, and which in the word of one commentator ‘appears to have an averable sion to democracies’.

Founded in December 2008, months after he left office, and eventually employing more than 200 staff around the world, it offered what was described on its website as ‘advice and support’ to foreign governments as well as ‘geopolitical and strategic’ counsel to large companies.

To what remains of his circle of friends and supporters, this was an entirely decent endeavour, providing Blair with a vehicle to earn money that – he constantly insisted – was being funnelled into supporting his selfless charitable work.

TO a rather larger number of critics, who noted with a cynical eye his everexpanding property empire and billionaire lifestyle, things of course looked rather different.

They saw TBA as a vehicle through which he shamelessly leveraged the contacts and experience gained in public office for personal gain, destroying his reputation and debasing the office of British Prime Minister (perhaps irredeemably) in the process.

The firm’s absence of a moral compass could be gleaned, it was claimed, from its willingness to sign consultancy deals with a string of dodgy regimes and rapacious companies, including the government of Kuwait (an absolute monarchy which paid TBA a reported £27 million over four years), and the corrupt dictator of Kazakhstan (which we shall discuss later).

Hardly helping things with regard to its public image was the fact that TBA also stood at the head of corporate structure that was deliberately created to render Blair’s business activities almost entirely impenetrable.

The edifice of ‘limited partnerships’ was devised by the auditing firm KPMg, along with robert Barnett, Blair’s lawyer and literary agent, who secured a rumoured £4.6m advance for his memoirs (which Blair, 63, with some fanfare gifted the British Legion). it represents the most complex and secretive configuration of companies that it’s possible to legally create under uK law.

in a nutshell, the structure involves no fewer than 12 legal entities beneath TBA, split into two different groups. One is known as ‘Windrush’ and the other as ‘Firerush’. They consist of limited partnerships which sit on top of other limited partnerships. These are in turn organised via nominee companies through leading private wealth lawyers Bircham Dyson Bell, which boast such accessible names such as ‘BDBCO no 819’. Although money passes between the different organisations in this network, the bizarre and opaque structure means it’s impossible to know exactly how much cash is there, or where it eventually ends up. Crucially, the structure also has the effect of making it impossible for even a forensic accountant to establish from outside who exactly is paying for the services of either Blair or TBA.

Though ‘clearly not intended under uK law, it’s possible under uK law,’ is how the tax expert richard Murphy once described the opacity of the enterprise, noting that it provides Blair with ‘close to the secrecy he would have achieved if he was outside the uK in a tax haven’.

The result has of course been to prevent the media, and by the extension the British public, establishing exactly how much Blair has made during his eightyear business career. As his biographers David Hencke and Francis Beckett put it in their book Blair inc, ‘even he might have difficulty calculating’ his net worth.

When details of his paid work have leaked out, however, they have rarely failed to be controversial, largely because of the extent to which Blair’s political interests became intertwined with his money-making ones.

The Mail was leaked an extraordinary dossier of documents this year detailing TBA’s dealings with its most controversial client - the autocratic government of Kazakhstan, whose longstanding dictator nursultan nazarbayev has run the country as a personal fiefdom for almost 30 years, and whose regime has murdered and imprisoned opponents, shut down opposition newspapers, and siphoned cash to a network of cronies and family members.

The papers, which included 30 emails, and several business pitches, showed how Blair, who had originally forged a friendship with the Kazakh despot while in office, demanded a fee of £5.3 million per year for TBA to work with the dodgy administration.

in return, he promised to offer ‘leader to leader’ advice to the despot, helping to provide political and legal counsel, train civil servants, and present the country on the world stage as a ‘remarkable success story’.

Our leaked emails showed how he first offered ‘private strategic advice’ to nazarbayev just a year after leaving office, and went on to sign a first consultancy deal in 2011.

Since then, the company’s paid work had extended to helping the dictator fend off international criticism over a massacre of striking oil workers, and advising him to enlist the help of Baroness Ashton, a new-Labour-cronyturned-Eu Commissioner, in setting up a ‘partnership and cooperation’ deal with the Eu.

Presuming TBA had earned £5.3 million each year that it worked for nazarbayev, its overall income would have been upwards of £20 million.

WHErE that money ended up is of course anyone’s guess. But it should be noted that it represents income from just a single client. Blair has in the same period pursued business in dozens of countries, many of which bear only a passing relationship with democracy, including Dubai, Azerbaijan, China, Qatar, and Colombia.

Today, after nearly eight lucrative years, that dubious line of work would appear to be at an end.

TBA and the opaque network of ‘Windrush’ and ‘Firerush’ companies are finally to be wound up, and their remaining funds placed into a new organisation devoted to what has been described as ‘not for profit’ work.

According to Mr Blair’s office, the new organisation will even start publishing full accounts. This will not, of course, shed light on the murky fortune he has acquired since leaving office, but as he approaches official retirement age, with an eye on his personal legacy, this most tarnished of statesmen presumably hopes it might begin to repair his tattered reputation.