Tag: LOBBYING

  • On the desert trail of Tony Blair’s millions

    On the desert trail of Tony Blair’s millions

    An explosive new TV documentary reveals the apparent conflict of interests that allows the former prime minister, now a Middle East peace envoy, to earn millions.

    tonyblair
    A bit rich: Mr Blair has said that he is worth 'considerably less' than £20 million Photo: REUTERS

    By Peter Oborne

    One of the first letters arranging Tony Blair’s 2008 visit to Colonel Gaddafi, the now deposed Libyan despot, was written on the notepaper of the “Office of the Quartet Representative” – the formal title of the former British prime minister, reflecting his role as Middle East peace envoy.

    Mr Blair flew into Tripoli in a jet arranged by the Libyan government, and was met by British diplomats. Yet a well-placed source has told The Daily Telegraph that his visits were little to do with Middle East peace, saying instead that the “visits were lobby visits for banking deals with JP Morgan” the US investment bank that pays Mr Blair a consultancy fee of a reported £2 million a year. However, Mr Blair’s official spokesman categorically denied that Blair lobbied Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi’s son, on behalf of the bank, insisting that the visits were largely to do with African affairs.

    Much remains mysterious about Mr Blair’s repeated visits to Tripoli over the past few years. But they display the essential characteristic of the jet-setting billionaire lifestyle he has enjoyed ever since leaving Downing Street in June 2007: an extraordinary confusion of public duty and private interest.

    Was Mr Blair in Libya – as the headed notepaper would suggest – to discuss Middle East peace with Gaddafi? Was he working on behalf of his Governance Initiative, which claims it “pioneers a new way of working with African countries”? Was he sounding out deals for J P Morgan, as the well-placed Telegraph source insists? Or was he there on behalf of his own very lucrative money-making concern, Tony Blair Associates (TBA), whose professed objective is to provide “strategic advice” on “political and economic trends and government reform”?

    This confusion of motive and identity follows Mr Blair almost everywhere he goes, as we found when researching our forthcoming Channel 4 Dispatches film, The Wonderful World of Tony Blair.

    Let’s take the example of Mr Blair’s visit to the Emir of Kuwait, part of a wider Middle Eastern tour, made on January 26, 2009. He was introduced to the Emir – who is said to feel a profound sense of gratitude to the former British prime minister because of his role in deposing Kuwait’s greatest enemy, Saddam Hussein – in his capacity of Quartet Representative. And, indeed, Blair is charged by the Quartet with raising Middle Eastern funds to plough into Palestinian projects.

    Yet, puzzlingly, by his side was a figure who has nothing to do with the Quartet whatever: Jonathan Powell. Mr Powell, who used to be Downing Street Chief of Staff when Mr Blair was prime minister, today has a new role as senior adviser to Tony Blair Associates, the vehicle through which Mr Blair channels many of his money-earning interests. Mr Powell was perched on a sofa during the meeting.

    Shortly afterwards, the Emir handed Tony Blair Associates a lucrative consultancy deal to provide advice on the future of the Kuwaiti economy. Nobody knows how much this deal – which was kept secret for two years – is worth. Because the TBA contract was handled by the Emir’s personal office, it is exempt from scrutiny by Kuwait’s normally rigorous financial regulatory body.

    Few Kuwaitis are prepared to speak out publicly, because it is illegal to criticise the Emir. But Nasser Al Abolly, a leading Kuwaiti pro-democracy campaigner, said he had heard from good sources that Mr Blair had been paid 12 million dinars, about £27 million. “I believe this amount is exorbitant,” Abolly told us, adding that much of Blair’s eventual report was not original and had come up with many of the same recommendations as earlier reports on the future of Kuwait – an observation echoed by other Kuwaiti politicians. A spokesman for Mr Blair insists that the sum involved was far less than £27 million, though declined to say how much TBA had been paid.

    Mr Blair’s job as representative for the Quartet – the international diplomatic group that represents the US, Russia, the United Nations and Europe in their common attempt to forge peace in the Middle East – is riddled with this type of very troubling ambiguity.

    Let’s take the example of the deal trumpeted by Mr Blair as one of his greatest achievements in his role as Quartet Representative – his success in persuading the Israeli government to open up radio frequencies so that the phone company Wataniya Mobile can operate in the West Bank.

    Wataniya Mobile’s chief executive officer Bassam Hanoun cannot praise Mr Blair too highly. He told us that the Wataniya network had been built, “but it was dead, not operational” – until Mr Blair’s forceful intervention with Israeli ministers.

    Yet Wataniya’s owner, the Qatari telecoms giant QTEL, is a major client of one of the former prime minister’s most significant paymasters, JP Morgan. When QTEL bought Wataniya Mobile’s parent company, Wataniya International, in 2007, the company did so with a $2 billion loan that JP Morgan helped to arrange, and the bank stood to make huge profits once the radio frequencies were released.

    A near identical conflict involves a second major Palestinian project for which Mr Blair is lobbying heavily – the development of a huge gas field off the shore of Gaza worth more than $6 billion. Once again, he is fighting to overturn an Israeli edict blocking development, and again there is a potential conflict of interest. British Gas, which owns the rights to operate the field, is a major client of, yes, you guessed it, JP Morgan.

    JP Morgan insists it has never discussed either the Wataniya or the British Gas deal with Mr Blair – while the former prime minister insists that in both cases he was, in any case, wholly unaware of the JP Morgan connection.

    Nevertheless, the conflict is glaring – and Mr Blair would be unable to get away with this kind of confusion if he were a public servant in Britain, or working for an international organisation such as the World Bank or the IMF.

    Dr Nicholas Allen, a senior politics lecturer at the University of London, specialising in parliamentary ethics, told us: “It is not altogether clear that Blair is separating very clearly his work as the representative of the Quartet and his business interests. Clearly, if he was holding a ministerial office in Britain, that kind of conflict – even the appearance of that kind of conflict, the appearance of that influence – wouldn’t be tolerated.”

    Dr Allen says that no fewer than six out of seven of the Nolan principles – the code of ethics for public servants enforced by Mr Blair when he was prime minister – “appear to be undermined by Blair’s conduct”.

    This immunity from ordinary standards comes despite the fact that Mr Blair is partly funded by the British taxpayer and gets the support of British civil servants. It all sounds uncannily similar to the notorious so-called “sofa government” – the confusion of formal roles and identities in the run up to the Iraq invasion for which, as prime minister, Mr Blair was censured by the former cabinet secretary Lord Butler.

    It must be acknowledged that Mr Blair does much philanthropic and public spirited work through his Africa governance initiative, his Faith Foundation, and also for the Quartet (even though we found very few Palestinians who were prepared to speak well of him). However, these admirable objectives have been compromised and tarnished by his apparent drive to make money.

    The Quartet cannot occupy more than one week a month of Blair’s schedule, perhaps less. He has earned a reported £6 million – though some in the City insist the real figure may be much higher – from JP Morgan since his consultancy started in 2008. Add in an estimated £1.5 million from advising the insurance group Zurich Financial services on its climate initiative.

    He has advised Mubadala, one of Abu Dhabi’s most prominent sovereign wealth funds, and the luxury goods concern LVMH. In the television programme, we calculate that the Blair family property portfolio alone – with seven houses ranging from his manor house in Buckinghamshire to his London house in Connaught Square – is worth over £14 million. And then comes a further reported £9 million or more from speeches.

    It is impossible to tell how much Tony Blair Inc is worth exactly because his finances are carefully hidden behind complex financial structures. Mr Blair himself is on record as saying that he is worth “considerably less” than £20 million. There is some reason to be sceptical of this claim.

    Mr Blair insists that his conduct since stepping down as prime minister has been honourable, above board and beyond reproach. But this much can surely be said: when Blair joined the Quartet, he was handed a priceless opportunity to earn a place in history by making a genuine commitment to world peace. He has made some progress. Yet he seems to treat his post as envoy for the Quartet as a part-time post, by allowing his private commercial interests to merge with his public duty. And – as ever – the old maestro is getting away with it.

    Additional reporting by Sasha Joelle Achilli. Watch Peter Oborne reporting for ‘Dispatches: The Wonderful World of Tony Blair’ on Monday at 8pm on Channel 4.

    www.telegraph.co.uk, 23 Sep 2011

     

     

  • 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

  • Facebook vs US establishment: who controls whom?

    Facebook vs US establishment: who controls whom?

    obama headquarters facebook president
    U.S. President Barack Obama (L) talks with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (R) during a town hall style meeting at Facebook headquarters. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images/AFP)

    As Facebook continues to hire current and former White House employees to enhance its lobby in state structures, concerns over the privacy policies and security practices of the world’s largest social networking site are on the rise.

    The man behind the US $750 million site, Mark Zuckerberg, appears to be hatching a fresh scheme to establish reliable links with both the Congress and the White House, dropping any pretence of party preferences.

    A whole team of advisors from Republican and Democrat camps have joined the ranks of Zuckerberg’s army ready to push, pull and protect the company’s interests at any given level of the American bureaucratic hierarchy.

    Facebook shares key positions with White House

    At first, hirings of former top civil servants were few and far between, occurring only about once a year. This was the deal back in September 2008 when Ted Ulloyt, a George W. Bush loyalist, was appointed to vice president and general counsel, reports The Washington Post.

    Two years later in June 2010, Marne Levine, a member of President Barack Obama’s staff, was hired to guide the social network’s policy issues from Washington.

    The current year has been seen a remarkable number of prominent government figures entering the  Facebook corporation.

    In May 2011, Facebook called a former aide to President George W. Bush – the Republican Joel Kaplan – to head its Washington office.

    In June this year, a former spokesman for President Bill Clinton’s administration, Joe Lockhart, was recruited to head Facebook’s communications team.

    President Obama’s special assistant for legislative affairs (who was also Vice President Biden’s former deputy chief of staff) Louisa Terrel is now to define Facebook’s public policy, a job she once did for Yahoo.

    Sheryl Sandberg, who used to work in the Treasury Department under Barack Obama’s Economic Adviser Lawrence Summers, is now employed as Faceboook’s chief operating officer.

    A new senior policy adviser and director of privacy, Erin Egan, will come to Facebook in October. She is currently co-chair at Covington & Burling’s global privacy and data security, a company ranked as being in the top ten for its privacy practices.

    Only last week, Zuckerberg introduced President Clinton’s chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, to Facebook’s board.

    All these people are to ensure that Facebook remains the industry leader, obsessed with the data security and privacy safety of its hundreds of millions of clients.

    At the same time, to an unbiased observer, the processes going on in the internet technology giant cannot but resemble putting a highly-successful company under full governmental control.

    Considering the unprecedented prospects the project opens in the field of global data collection, it appears only natural that the American government should promote its top people to key positions of responsibility with regard to Facebook’s data security.

    But RT guest Steve Rambam, founder and CEO of Pallorium Inc., an international online investigative service, has stated openly that companies like Facebook, Google or MySpace are “aggregating data on each of us bit by bit and before you know it, your entire life is on a disk.”

    Europe enforces its own rules

    In Europe, Facebook’s position appears somewhat shaky after it emerged that it had been used to organize some of the violence that erupted in London at the beginning of August.

    Despite active lobbying  –  the company hired former MEP Erika Mann as spokesperson for all EU institutions –  the American giant is to appear before a British Home Affairs Select Committee on “policing  large-scale disorder.”

    Facebook will not be alone: Twitter and BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion will stand alongside it to face the music over riots in the UK and the role these three technology companies played in the disorder, allegedly providing rioters with the means to organize and plan choreographed disorder and looting.

    But as predicted in August, the rioters’ trust in BlackBerry’s encrypted messaging has already backfired. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion appears to be fully co-operating with British detectives investigating the disorder and there is little doubt that Facebook and Twitter will follow suit.

    www.rt.com, 14 September, 2011

  • Coalition urged to act over lobbyists who use party groups ‘to buy influence’

    Coalition urged to act over lobbyists who use party groups ‘to buy influence’

    Investigation reveals more than £1.6m was channelled to MPs and lords in last year by corporations and interest groups

    James Ball

    Conservative MP Douglas Carswell
    Conservative MP Douglas Carswell says constituents should judge whether fringe benefits are legitimate. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

    Corporations and interest groups have channelled more than £1.6m to MPs and lords in the past year through sponsorship of parliamentary groups, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

    Parliamentary reformers given access to the Guardian’s findings have called on the coalition government to take action to prevent all-party groups acting as “mere front groups for lobbyists to buy influence”.

    Westminster has more than 450 all-party political groups, semi-official entities around particular subjects or countries, ranging from groups on asthma and autism, to the parliamentary choir and rowing team.

    The Guardian has found 283 of these groups receive financial support from outside interests, including:

    • £60,000 support for the parliamentary choir from BT

    • £52,000 from drink and pub companies for the beer group

    • £16,000 for the parliamentary boat race from Siemens

    Other benefits are less quantifiable: the members of the all-party wine and spirits group, co-chaired by former Tory shadow minister Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and new Labour MP Ian Mearns, receive corkage, refreshment and wine tasting thanks to the largesse of the Wine and Spirits Trade Association. Some sporting groups, such as the athletics or rugby league groups, receive free tickets to matches.

    Benefits of a less indulgent nature are offered to the parliamentary slimming group, whose members include Ed Vaizey and David Amess: they are entitled to receive free Slimming World membership, worth £290 a year.

    Conservative MP Douglas Carswell, an outspoken advocate for parliamentary reform, says constituents should make the judgment on whether such fringe benefits are legitimate.

    “I don’t know whether it’s legitimate for companies to hand out, say, sports tickets to MPs,” he said. “But if my constituents can see clearly and easily what I have received, sunlight is the best disinfectant. The public will quickly rule what they think is acceptable. It’s for them to decide, not a group of Westminster grandees.”

    Some MPs and lords are more enthusiastic members of all-party groups than others. The Guardian’s investigation reveals for the first time which MPs sit on the most groups. Topping the chart is veteran Conservative Peter Bottomley, who is a member of 151 groups; 65 more than fellow Tory David Amess, who is second with 86 memberships.

    All-party parliamentary groups do more than just indulge members’ hobbies. Many produce reports or studies into their areas of interest, and the groups are also entitled to issue Parliamentary passes – which give the bearer open access to the palace of Westminster.

    The Guardian has found that last year 70 groups declared issuing passes to individuals “advantaged by the privileged access to parliament afforded by their pass”. One recipient is Robin Ashby, the director-general of the UK Defence Forum, who has been stripped of a parliamentary pass on two previous locations, although he denies ever having used a pass improperly.

    Other passes have gone to Aviva’s public affairs consultant, the parliamentary officer of the council for Arab-British understanding, the political officer of the Unite union and the public policy officer of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference.

    Even groups with a more serious purpose, such as the all-party parliamentary group for diabetes, are often sponsored by vested corporate interest. The diabetes group received £28,000 funding for one of its reports from Japanese pharmaceutical company Takeda.

    The information technology group received more than £46,000 from companies including Vodafone, Motorola and Nominet, much of which funded annual dinners and receptions. Transport safety received £48,350 for unspecified purposes from a plethora of donors including 3M UK, Esure, Aviva, the Association of British Insurers, and the Royal Mail.

    Donations received by all-party groups are published on an online register, but as they are split across 485 pages in multiple categories, calculating the total influence on each group has previously been impossible. But the data website ScraperWiki wrote a computer script to collect the data in one place, allowing more detailed analysis of the register as at 23 December 2010. This also revealed for the first time that 45 groups are administered by professional parliamentary lobbyists, such as Quiller consultants, Luther Pendragon and Bell Pottinger Public Affairs.

    Several dozen more are administered by industry groups: the advertising group is administered by the Advertising Association; the food group by the Food and Drink Federation; Crossrail Ltd funds the secretariat for the Crossrail group, and even the group for the packaging manufacturing industry is administered by the packaging federation.

    Secretariat support can vary from a day a week’s support from a junior administrator to several employees working full-time to support a group’s function. All-party groups are not required to estimate the value of non-cash support – they need only include it on the register if they estimate its worth to be at least £1,500 a year – and so the full extent of sponsorship received by outside groups is still hidden from the public.

    “There’s a distinction to be made between legitimate lobbying and buying influence,” Carswell said.

    “MPs and Lords with a genuine interest in a subject gathering and talking to various lobbies is clearly a good thing. But others appear to be backed by blatant lobby groups – they are effectively a front for lobbies in parliament.

    Carswell added: “The coalition has promised to clean up politics. This is one area where they need to make a start.”

    www.guardian.co.uk, 24 February 2011