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Former Prime Minister urged watchdog to keep quiet on details of lucrative deals for consultancy firm
JUST over a year after stepping down as Prime Minister, Tony Blair had drawn up a detailed plan for his future career. And it would earn him a small fortune.
But a cache of documents revealed today by The Sunday Telegraph detail an apparent shyness of Mr Blair in relation to his future success.
In documents released to this newspaper following a legal battle with an official watchdog lasting almost four years, Mr Blair is revealed to have asked the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments ( ACOBA) to keep details of his commercial plans hidden from the public – despite the body’s practice of publishing lists of all the roles taken up by former ministers after they leave office.
Writing to ACOBA in November 2008, Mr Blair – who left Downing Street in June 2007 – revealed that he was planning to set up a new firm, Tony Blair Associates, known as TBA.
“TBA will be a small global advisory firm which will provide strategic advice to a small and select group of corporations and governments,” he said.
“In essence the work of TBA will be similar in nature and scope to the commercial work I have been engaged in since leaving office, such as that for JP Morgan Chase and Zurich Financial Services, for which the committee has already given its approval.”
At the time Mr Blair was reported to be earning a £2.5m salary as a part-time adviser to JP Morgan, the US bank, and another £2million for advising Zurich. Details of both appointments had been published by ACOBA after it signed off on the roles, as was required by the ministerial code.
Mr Blair’s plan was to open an advisory firm to significantly expand his roster of clients and farm out some of the day-to-day consultancy work to staff whom he would poach from Whitehall and top UK companies.
Members of the public would only hear of Tony Blair Associates three months later, in February 2009, when ACOBA published a note on its website stating that Mr Blair had set up the firm with the watchdog’s blessing.
But, in contrast to previous entries naming JP Morgan and Zurich as employers of Mr Blair, the entry for TBA named no specific clients. Nor were any forthcoming in the months afterwards.
ACOBA is required to vet all roles considered by former ministers for two years after they leave office, which for Mr Blair was June 2009, four months after the watchdog announced he had set up his advisory firm.
The apparent reason for ACOBA’s silence is revealed today in Mr Blair’s November 2008 letter.
“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,” Mr Blair said.
A major criticism of Mr Blair’s activities since leaving Downing Street is a lack of transparency over his commercial dealings. His letter suggests that to some degree this was a deliberate decision. His clients, he insisted, would need him to operate discreetly.
“Many of the individuals, governments and entities that TBA will serve… will not wish to have even the fact of a relationship with a consulting entity made public,” he wrote.
In subsequent months and years Mr Blair would pick up lucrative contracts advising Mubadala, the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, and governments including Kazakhstan and the United Arab Emirates. Such was his success that he took to criss-crossing the world in a £30million private jet.
Many of the deals would only become public as a result of investigative journalism, much of it by The Telegraph.
With little success, MPs repeatedly called for Mr Blair to proactively release information about his contracts, in order to help allay concerns about his paid work for foreign states, and possible conflicts of interest – which he has always denied – with his unpaid envoy role in the Middle East.
The documents obtained by this newspaper suggest ACOBA could have published details of TBA’s first clients in 2009 but chose not to do so following Mr Blair’s request for “confidentiality”.
Yesterday Mr Blair´s spokesman declined to answer questions about contracts he may have taken up that were not approved or disclosed by ACOBA in the two-year period after he left office.
The Mubadala role, which was revealed by newspapers in late 2009, had not been listed by ACOBA. A spokesman simply insisted Mr Blair “sought [ACOBA’s] advice and followed it”.
An ACOBA spokesman said the rules had changed “significantly” since its dealings with Mr Blair.
Such was the apparent desire of ACOBA’s officials to please the former Prime Minister, they even consulted his office on the wording they would use to describe TBA when it published its statement revealing that the firm had been set up with its blessing.
“We have now heard back from Mr Blair and he would like the following text to go in the appointment box,” a member of the former Prime Minister’s staff said on February 20 2009.
The email included a statement saying Mr Blair had established a firm that would provide “strategic advice”. It went on: “As previously discussed, we are not looking to [attract] press attention at all given its embryonic nature.”
The response from ACOBA added just eight more words at the end of the statement to describe the role of the firm – an addition it assured Mr Blair’s office would not “stand out so much as to attract unnecessary attention”.
Even following that email Mr Blair’s office reverted with another change from the former Prime Minister, who was otherwise “happy with that”.
Six months later, Lord Lang, a former trade secretary, took over as ACOBA chairman, and subsequently gave Mr Blair a gentle telling-off for his separate insistence on confidentiality in relation to two clients he had been advising before setting up TBA – the Kuwaiti government and UI Energy, a Korean firm for whom he had been brokering a deal in Abu Dhabi. Mr Blair had said both clients required his work to be temporarily kept private.
But Lord Lang insisted that the appointments would be published on the ACOBA website along with the committee’s advice that both were permissible.
It was, he said, “an important aspect” of ACOBA’s work that its advice is revealed “so that the public can be reassured that appointments taken up by former Ministers have been scrutinised”.
‘As previously discussed, we are not looking to [attract] press attention at all, given its embryonic nature’