Tag: JP Morgan

  • Tony Blair and the £8million tax ‘mystery’

    Tony Blair and the £8million tax ‘mystery’

    Former Prime Minister Tony Blair channelled millions of pounds through a complicated web of companies and paid just a fraction in tax, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

    tony blair
    Tony Blair channelled millions of pounds through a complicated web of companies. Photo: Getty

    By Robert Mendick, Chief Reporter

    Official accounts show a company set up by Mr Blair to manage his business affairs paid just £315,000 in tax last year on an income of more than £12 million. In that time, he employed 26 staff and paid them total wages of almost £2.3 million.

    The accounts provide the strongest evidence yet of the huge sums generated by Mr Blair through his various activities since quitting Downing Street in June 2007.

    He runs a business consultancy – Tony Blair Associates – which has deals with the governments of Kuwait and Kazakhstan among others and is a paid adviser to JP Morgan, an American investment bank, and to Zurich International, a global insurance company based in Switzerland. Mr Blair makes a further £100,000 a time from speeches and lectures while also presiding over a number of charities including a faith foundation.

    Mr Blair has previously been criticised for cashing in on contacts made in Downing Street and these accounts will likely add to those concerns.

    The documents also reveal that in the two years until March 31 last year, Mr Blair’s management company had a total turnover of more than £20 million and paid tax of about £470,000.

    The scale of Mr Blair’s finances are shown in accounts lodged by Windrush Ventures Limited, just one of a myriad of companies and partnerships set up by the former prime minister. Windrush Ventures Ltd’s “principal activity” is the “provision of management services” to Mr Blair’s various other interests.

    The accounts for the 12 months to March 31 were lodged with Companies House in the week between Christmas and New Year and made publicly available for the first time last week. Previously the accounts have contained almost no information because Windrush was classified as a small company. This time auditors appear to have been obliged to divulge more information because of the amount of money being handled.

    The accounts show a turnover of £12.005 million and administrative expenses of £10.919 million, leaving Windrush Ventures with a profit of just over £1 million, on which Mr Blair paid tax of £315,000. The tax was paid at the corporate tax rate of 28 per cent.

    Of those expenses, £2.285 million went on paying 26 employees at an average salary of almost £88,000. Windrush Ventures also pays £550,000 a year to rent Mr Blair’s offices in Grosvenor Square, a stone’s throw from the US embassy in Mayfair in central London and a further sum of about £300,000 on office equipment and furniture. But those costs amount to a little more than £3 million, meaning almost £8 million of “administrative expenditure” is unexplained in the accounts.

    It is not known from the accounts what happened to that huge sum.

    Tax specialists who have studied the accounts have told The Sunday Telegraph that the tax paid in 2010 of £154,000 and £315,000 in 2011 appears low because costs have been offset against the administrative costs, which remain largely unexplained.

    One City accountant, who did not wish to be named, said: “It is very difficult to see what these administrative costs could be. It is a very large amount for a business like this. I am sure it is legitimate but it is certainly surprising.

    “The tax bill of £315,000 is explained by the large administrative costs that are being treated as tax allowable.”

    Richard Murphy, a charted accountant who runs Tax Research LLP and has studied Mr Blair’s company accounts, said: “There is about £8 million which we don’t know where it goes. That money is unexplained. There is no indication at all why the administration costs are so high. What has happened to about £8 million which is being offset against tax?”

    There is no suggestion that Mr Blair’s tax affairs are anything other than legitimate. His accounts are audited by KPMG, one of the world’s biggest accountancy firms. Mr Blair presides over 12 different legal entities, handling the millions of pounds he has received since leaving office. Another set of companies, which are run in parallel to Windrush Ventures, are called Firerush Ventures and appear to operate in exactly the same, oblique way.

    The money paid into Windrush Ventures Ltd largely comes from Windrush Ventures No. 3 Limited Partnership, which appears to be where money is deposited before being spread around other companies, ultimately in Mr Blair’s ownership. The limited partnership does not have to disclose publicly any accounts allowing its activities to remain secret.

    Mr Murphy said last night: “It is in the limited partnership where things really happen. But that is the one Mr Blair keeps secret. We don’t know how much money is in the LP. It is completely hidden. The question is why is Tony Blair running such as a completely secretive organisation?”

    A spokesman for Mr Blair said last night: “The Windrush accounts are prepared in accordance with the relevant legal, accounting and regulatory guidance. Tony Blair continues to be a UK taxpayer on all of his income and all of his companies are UK registered for tax purposes.”

    The spokesman added that the accounts did not relate to any of Mr Blair’s charitable activities, which raised money separately as independently registered charities.

    The spokesman chose not to explain what happened to about £8 million of administrative expenses.

    www.telegraph.co.uk, 07 Jan 2012

  • Tony Blair ‘visited Libya to lobby for JP Morgan’

    Tony Blair ‘visited Libya to lobby for JP Morgan’

    Tony Blair used visits to Libya after he left office to lobby for business for the American investment bank JP Morgan, The Daily Telegraph has been told.

    blair and gaddafi
    Mr Blair was flown to Libya twice at Gaddafi's expense on one of the former dictator's private jets Photo: GETTY

    By Richard Spencer, Tripoli, Heidi Blake and Jon Swaine in New York

    A senior executive with the Libyan Investment Authority, the $70 billion fund used to invest the country’s oil money abroad, said Mr Blair was one of three prominent western businessmen who regularly dealt with Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the former leader.

    Saif al-Islam and his close aides oversaw the activities of the fund, and often directed its officials on where they should make its investments, he said.

    The executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, said officials were told the “ideas” they were ordered to pursue came from Mr Blair as well as one other British businessman and a former American diplomat.

    “Tony Blair’s visits were purely lobby visits for banking deals with JP Morgan,” he said.

    He said that unlike some other deals – notably some investments run by the US bank Goldman Sachs – JP Morgan’s had never turned “bad”.

    Documents found by The Sunday Telegraph published this weekend showed Mr Blair had made at least three visits to Tripoli, twice in the lead-up to the release of the alleged Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Megrahi in 2008 and 2009 and once last year. On the first two occasions he was flown to the country on planes arranged by Col Gaddafi.

    A senior diplomat told The Daily Telegraph last night that the British embassy in Tripoli had arranged transport for Mr Blair and his entourage in Tripoli and ensured that representatives were there to “greet him and see him off” at the airport.

    Mr Blair stayed overnight at the ambassador’s official residence in Tripoli and was accompanied by “several” British police officers for protection.

    The documents show that among the people he was due to meet in 2009 was Mohammed Layas, head of the LIA.

    A spokesman for Mr Blair said that the visits had largely been to discuss Africa, and categorically denied that he had lobbied Said al-Islam on behalf of JP Morgan.

    The spokesman said last night: “As we have made clear many times before, Tony Blair has never had any role, either formal or informal, paid or unpaid, with the Libyan Investment Authority or the Government of Libya and he does not and has never had any commercial relationship with any Libyan company or entity.”

    Mr Blair began work in January 2008 as a £2million-a-yearn adviser to JP Morgan. Last month, American officials told the New York Post newspaper that the bank managed more than half a billion US dollars on behalf of the LIA.

    The executive said that he did not see Mr Blair at the LIA headquarters in the modern Tower of the Revolution overlooking the seafront. He said officials like himself were given their instructions by two senior Saif aides, including Mohammed Ismail, a Libyan with British nationality.

    One of the letters arranging the 2008 visit, in which an aide to Mr Blair told the Libyan ambassador to Britain that the former prime minister was “delighted” that “The Leader” was likely to be able to see him, was on notepaper headed “Office of the Quartet Representative”, his formal title as Middle East envoy.

    The Quartet he represents is made up of the European Union, the United Nations, Russia and the United States. A spokesman for Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, said: “It’s up to him to explain why he did this.”

    The growing closeness of the Blair government to the Gaddafi regime has already come under fire. Abdulhakim Belhadj, former leader the Libyan Islamist Fighting Group and now head of the revolutionary Tripoli Military Council, is demanding an apology after papers showed MI6 arranged for his secret extradition from Malaysia back to Libya in 2004.

    Many ordinary Libyans have also expressed surprise at the policy. After the latest revelations, Hoda Abuzeid, a British Libyan whose dissident father was murdered in London in 1995, accused Mr Blair of “selling out”.

    “People like Blair and those who had their eyes on the business opportunities that Gaddafi could provide sold out people like my family,” said Miss Abuzeid, who has returned to the country for the first time since 1980.

    “When he had tea in the desert with the ‘Brother Leader’ did he ever ask him who killed my father?”

    www.telegraph.co.uk, 18 Sep 2011