A man without morals: Laid bare in our devastating series by a top
investigative writer, the sickening truth about how Blair's made
MILLIONS from doing dirty deals with dictators:
1. Former PM Tony Blair’s role as Middle East peace envoy opened doors;
2. In 2015 he flew to Nigeria to meet the new president, Muhammadu Buhari;
3. Offered to sell Israeli drones and equipment to help defeat Boko Haram;
4. Credentials then helped him win £20m deal with Kuwait to review economy and
5. Later agreed to help dodgy company in South Korea secure an oil contract
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 introduced 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 in Blair’s charity work fighting the Ebola virus. ‘Could you
all leave 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 looking 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 lavatory
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 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 well-
known 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 fund — 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 their 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 Azerbaijan 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.
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