Blair asked officials to keep lucrative deals a secret
TONY BLAIR personally asked government officials to keep details of lucrative post-Downing Street advisory work hidden from the public, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.
In a letter sent the year after he stepped down as prime minister, Mr Blair insisted that any contracts he struck on behalf of his new consultancy firm should be kept “confidential” to protect his new clients, including foreign governments and major international companies.
Following his intervention, the official watchdog that vets the jobs ministers take up after leaving office quietly agreed to avoid publishing details about Tony Blair Associates that would “attract unnecessary attention”. It never published the names of its clients, despite publishing details of work Mr Blair had before the firm was set up.
The ministerial code requires former ministers to consult the advisory committee on business appointments (ACOBA) on each role they wish to take up within two years of leaving office. ACOBA’s rules state that it should publish its advice in each case.
The correspondence forms part of a cache of documents obtained by this newspaper following a four-year legal battle to shed light on the clearance Mr Blair received before striking multimillion-pound deals to advise Gulf states and conglomerates. ACOBA was forced by a judge to hand over the papers after spending an estimated minimum of £10,000 in legal fees resisting a Freedom of Information request by The Sunday Telegraph.
The documents reveal for the first time that, in addition to the contracts already known to have been struck by
Mr Blair, the former prime minister also sought advice on agreements to advise LVMH, the French owner of the Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton fashion houses, Harbinger Capital Partners, a US hedge fund, and the Lagardere Group, a media conglomerate run by Arnaud Lagardere, a close friend of Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president.
Today’s disclosures follow years of controversy over Mr Blair’s commercial activities since leaving Downing Street in June 2007. He has been re- peatedly accused of cashing in on contacts gained while in office, and of a series of potential conflicts of interest with the unpaid Quartet envoy role he carried out for eight years in the Middle East.
The revelation that government officials agreed to help mask details of TBA’s work – and then spent thousands of pounds resisting the release of their communications with him – is likely to anger MPs and campaigners who have called for more transparency in his commercial dealings.
In a hand-signed letter to ACOBA in November 2008, Mr Blair stated: “I am writing to ask that TBA be permitted to maintain confidentiality with respect to its clients rather than report each individual commission it is offered to you for advice and subsequent publication. “Many of the individuals, governments and entities that TBA will serve, operate in competitive environments where disclosure of projects, plans and affiliations can have adverse commercial or political consequences, and they simply will not wish to have even the fact of a relationship with a consulting entity made public.”
When ACOBA said it had to publish some details of the firm, Mr Blair’s office reiterated that “we are not looking to [attract] press attention at all given its embryonic nature”. It suggested wording that simply described the company as providing “strategic advice”. ACOBA published no further details about TBA beyond a short statement and Mr Blair closed the firm in 2016.
Mr Blair’s spokesman said that he “acted in accordance with the ACOBA guidelines at all times. There was absolutely no conflict between the commercial activities of TBA and his work as Quartet representative. No consultancy touched on that work in any way at all.”
The spokesman declined to say whether Mr Blair took up the LVMH, Harbinger or Lagardere Group roles.