So two sovereign wealth funds known well to Tony Blair made very similar buy-ups of Thames Water at about the same time. The company’s board of directors includes Ed Richards, another of the former members of Tony Blair’s policy unit at No. 10 – he advised the PM on media, telecoms, the internet and e-government.12
Thames Water paid no corporation tax in 2012 despite making profits of more than half a billion pounds. That year the company put up customer bills by 6.7 per cent, awarded its chief executive a £274,000 bonus and made profits of £549 million on a turnover of £1.8 billion. It even managed to get a £5 million credit from the Treasury by writing off investments against the amount it was due to pay the government.13
The company’s accounts also revealed that it paid £328.2 million interest on ‘inter-company loans’ to pay external bondholders such as pension funds via a Cayman Islands funding vehicle.14
The arrangement is legal; however, the head of industry regulator Ofwat said that the complex tax arrangements and large profits of some water companies were ‘morally questionable’.15
The CIC is one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds and oversees part of China’s £2 trillion of foreign-exchange reserves. Blair has visited China regularly over many years. His spokesman told the Daily Telegraph that Blair and Tony Blair Associates (TBA) ‘know CIC well’. But the spokesman denied that they were paid consultants to CIC.
The spokesman also denied claims that Blair had anything to do with advising CIC on its purchase of its 8.68 per cent stake in Thames Water.
The international and increasingly wealthy globe-trotter had a large rolodex of names of potential clients. But no name would prove more sensational and more controversial than that of the late and unlamented Colonel Gadaffi of Libya, whom he embraced with apparent alacrity.
Notes
1 www.asiancorrespondent.com, 22 October 2012: http://asiancorrespondent.com
/91064/tony-blair-adds-burma-to-
se-asia-good-governance-tour/
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 New Republic, 21 January 2014: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/
116241/burma-2014-countryside-concentration-
camps?b&utm_campaign=tnr-daily-newsletter&;
utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_
content=11717587
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Daily Mail, 19 March 2010: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
1259030/Tony-Blairs-secret-dealings-South-
Korean-oil-firm-UI-Energy-Corp.html#ixzz1XrL59Pgo
9 The Guardian, 17 March 2010: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/
2010/mar/17/tony-blair-cash-south-korea-oil
10 Daily Mail, 19 March 2010: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/
article-1259030/Tony-Blairs-secret-dealings-South-
Korean-oil-firm-UI-Energy-Corp.html#ixzz1XrL59Pgo
11 Daily Mail, 20 March 2010: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/
article-1259496/Boss-Korean-firm-gave-Tony-
Blair-secret-cash-jailed-bribery.html#ixzz1ibrZ6APW
12 Daily Mail, 11 June 2013: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
news/article-2339864/ALEX-BRUMMER-
Sewer-rats-The-greedy-foreign-owners-water-
firms-squeeze-customers-dry-Thames-Water-
avoiding-tax-final-insult.html#ixzz2r2o0MVeX
13 Independent, 11 June 2013: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/
uk/home-news/sold-down-the-river-
how-thames-water-diverts-its-tax-liability-via-the-caribbean
-despite-549m-profit-and-67-price-hike-8652305.html
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
CHAPTER SEVEN
EMBRACING GADDAFI
‘Unless Mr Blair can come up with a convincing explanation as to why the Quartet secretariat should have been involved in this visit [to Libya], it would indeed be a reason for legitimate and serious criticism.’
– FORMER FOREIGN SECRETARY MALCOLM RIFKIND.
Papers found in Tripoli after Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s overthrow in 2011 showed that Blair held at least six private meetings with the Libyan dictator in the three years after he left Downing Street, which probably encouraged Gaddafi in his mistaken assumption that the West would not act against him.
As often happens with Blair, it is unclear exactly whom he was representing – even those accompanying him were unclear about that, which led to some bitter recriminations.
Oil may have been a part of it. US oil companies anxious to speed up the pace of rapprochement between Washington and Tripoli had set up a lobbying organisation, which was seeking allies, called the US–Libya Business Association (USLB). The US companies were concerned that European oil companies were getting to Libya ahead of them.1
Blair’s then head of communications Rachel Grant told Ken Silverstein that the Blair–Gaddafi meetings were ‘primarily on the subject of Africa’. But he wrote a note to Gaddafi on Quartet letterhead after one meeting, so did the two men discuss Middle East peace? Or, as sources told the Daily Telegraph, maybe he was there ‘sounding out deals for JP Morgan’? Or was he instead sounding out deals for Tony Blair Associates, which might explain why, after one 2008 meeting, he wrote to thank Gaddafi for his ‘hospitality during my visit to Libya and for taking the time to meet with me’ and to emphasise that he was ‘particularly interested in what you said about the funds that will be dedicated to projects in Africa, since you know I am doing a lot of work there and know of good, worthwhile projects for investments.’2
At Blair’s last meeting with Gaddafi as Prime Minister, a month before his resignation, he was accompanied by BP chairman Peter Sutherland, who subsequently announced the company would return to Libya after a thirty-year absence.
So perhaps oil was discussed. It seems certain that investment matters of interest to the bank JP Morgan Chase were discussed.
Tim Collins, the billionaire founder of a Wall Street investment company, Ripplewood Holdings, and a former close friend of Blair, told us, ‘I assume what he does for JPM is open doors. He is a complicated character; he is hard not to like. But, when you step back, his business doesn’t make much sense to me. The idea that he is giving advice to anyone seems to me a stretch. I have never known much about his business. Whenever he talked about his business, it seemed pie in the sky.’
Five of the meetings with Gaddafi took place in a fourteen-month period before the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohammed al-Megrahi – the man who went to prison in Scotland accused of being the Lockerbie bomber. On at least two of these occasions Blair flew to Tripoli on a private jet paid for by the Libyan regime.3
This did not come out until five years later, in 2013, when the Daily Telegraph revealed that, on 2 June 2008, a member of Blair’s Quartet staff, Gavin Mackay, wrote on Office of the Quartet Representative-headed paper to Libya’s ambassador in London, expressing Blair’s gratitude that Libya was providing him with a private jet to fly him from Sierra Leone to Tripoli for a four-hour stopover and then on to the UK.
Former UK Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind commented, ‘Unless Mr Blair can come up with a convincing explanation as to why the Quartet secretariat should have been involved in this visit, it would indeed be a reason for legitimate and serious criticism.’4
Blair held secret talks with the Colonel in April 2009, four months before al-Megrahi’s release. Again he was flown to Libya at Gaddafi’s expense, in Gaddafi’s private jet. Libya was threatening to cut all business links if al-Megrahi stayed in a British jail.
Blair brought American billionaire Tim Collins to that meeting. Gaddafi seems to have thought Collins was there to advise Gaddafi on building the beach resorts he was planning on the Libyan coast. But a spokesperson for Collins stated, ‘Tim was asked to go by Tony Blair in his position as a trustee of Mr Blair’s US Faith Foundation.’
In fact, we understand Collins thought he was there to further the Tony Blair Faith Foundati
on campaign to get bed nets for children in Africa to protect them against malaria; and that they were talking to Gaddafi because he was head of the African Union. Collins was surprised when Blair turned up with some people from JP Morgan in tow.
Whatever the truth, Collins thought Gaddafi quite mad, and has told friends that Blair’s deferential attitude towards the dictator made him cringe. Collins himself was clear that he had only come for the Faith Foundation, and to talk about bed nets, but Gaddafi seemed more interested in getting him to help with investment.
As he left, the British ambassador asked Collins if he would help Gaddafi with some business and Collins said that the guy was crazy, and he would not take his money. The beach resort was a non-starter, anyway, because the Libyans would not allow alcohol or gambling at the resorts, apparently. Quite why Blair needed to have with him a trustee of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation is not clear, since bed nets appear hardly to have been discussed, if at all.
Collins, we are told, was never quite sure what Blair had in mind and has told friends that Blair may have set up the meeting for bed nets, but JP Morgan got business from it. Blair, he says, is charismatic; people take his calls, he can set up meetings, as with Gaddafi – but what’s it all for?
A friend of Bill Clinton, Tim Collins is no longer a trustee of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. He is one of the wealthy and well-connected American businessmen on whose advice Blair relied heavily, but he has broken with Blair now.
He is a member of the Yale Divinity School advisory board, and getting to know Collins was one of the benefits that the Yale connection had for Blair. He is also a member of the Yale School of Management board of advisers, and of the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia. He attended the 2010, 2011 and 2012 Bilderberg Group conferences in Spain, Switzerland and Chantilly, Virginia, alongside the great and the good in international politics and finance.
Blair’s old friends in the now-bankrupt Monitor organisation were also involved with Libya. ‘Monitor is not a lobbying organization,’ its CEO Mark Fuller and director Rajeev Singh-Molares wrote to their Libyan client in July 2006. ‘Our ability to introduce important, influential visitors to Libya’s advantage depends on our experience, prestige, networks and reputation for independence. We are deeply committed to helping you with this program.’5
Blair’s involvement with Libya and its autocratic ruler goes back to his premiership. Mohammed Rashid (whom we met in Chapter 1) became a key figure in a secret intelligence ‘back channel’ through which MI6 was trying to induce Libya to give up its nuclear-weapons programme. Blair saw the considerable commercial benefits: access to Libya’s colossal reserves of oil and gas, as well as huge opportunities for foreign firms to renew its ancient infrastructure.
Blair, as we have seen, also dealt with Rashid (while still PM) over Palestinian gas, when Rashid brokered the Gaza gas consortium. Rashid was the former financial adviser to Yasser Arafat, who appointed him head of the Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF), a £1 billion company set up to make use of PLO funds. He is now on the run, having been sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment for fraud.
In 2002, Rashid was not only Arafat’s financial adviser but also that of Colonel Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, and was spending increasing amounts of time in Tripoli. That autumn, as the storm over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) gathered over Iraq, Saif asked Rashid to use his British contacts to open talks. Rashid arranged a secret meeting between Saif al-Islam and three MI6 officers in a hotel room in London’s Mayfair in March 2003.
Saif al-Islam quickly agreed that Libya could make a sincere effort to address WMD concerns. Saif says the British reciprocated by immediately obtaining Blair’s promise to deal with Libya in good faith. ‘When they called 10 Downing Street,’ he recalls, ‘they said, “Don’t fall off your chair. We got something from the Libyans.” It was a total surprise to them.’
The next day Saif flew to meet his father, who was on a state visit to Burkina Faso, and received his blessing for the initiative. ‘I will see if we can be friends,’ he quotes his father as saying over a lamb-and-rice lunch. Gaddafi dispatched his foreign-intelligence chief Musa Kusa to Geneva for a meeting with top MI6 and CIA officials, who then travelled secretly to Tripoli in September to meet Gaddafi himself. The Libyans agreed in principle to throw the country’s WMD projects open to an MI6–CIA team of technical experts.
Progress was slow. The Iraq War was in full swing, which complicated negotiations, and Gaddafi wanted some guaranteed incentives – such as military cooperation and a complete end to sanctions – if Libya were to admit to and then dismantle its WMD programmes. When Gaddafi grew nervous, Saif al-Islam says he reassured his father about the West’s intentions, telling him, ‘Trust me.’ Saif’s recollection was, ‘I could smell it.’
Saif says that Gaddafi’s confidence grew as the number of messages from the British and US governments came in via MI6 and the CIA. In September 2003, Gaddafi was handed a personal letter from Prime Minister Blair formally agreeing to Gaddafi’s conditions for proceeding. That paved the way for the visit of the MI6–CIA technical team to inspect all of Libya’s secret WMD sites.
‘We realised that we were dealing with friends and sincere people,’ Saif al-Islam says. He and government officials spent months in secret negotiations with representatives of both the CIA and MI6, working out a deal in which Libya would give up its nuclear ambitions. There was almost a last-minute hiccup when American soldiers captured Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein after the Iraq War. Gaddafi was worried that the humiliating capture of Saddam would be seen as his motive; he wanted to postpone the deal.
According to Saif al-Islam, the Prime Minister pleaded with Gaddafi, ‘Please, we are in a hurry. It is a big success for all of us.’ Blair’s pleading worked. Gaddafi agreed to dismantle his weapons.
After Western agents had worked to remove all the components of Libya’s WMD programme and dismantle its long-range ballistic missiles, Blair sent the Libyan leader a friendly letter of congratulation, addressing him as ‘Dear Muammar’ and signing off ‘Best wishes, Yours ever, Tony’.6
On 18 December, Blair and Gaddafi talked by telephone and the very next day Blair and Bush announced Gaddafi was ending his WMD programme.
Blair and Gaddafi remained in touch for the rest of Blair’s premiership, which ended in 2007, after which they kept contact. In 2004 they had their famous meeting in a tent near Tripoli, the ‘deal in the desert’, to destroy WMD. The same year, Gaddafi put up £40 billion of cash assets, triggering a war between major investment banks.
The British MI6 officer who conducted the negotiations with Gaddafi alongside his counterpart from the CIA was Sir Mark Allen, a former adviser to Blair and a former head of the MI6 Middle East Bureau, who now works for BP and is a key figure in the Blair story.
Allen is a member of London School of Economics (LSE) Ideas Advisory Board, whose membership reads like a Who’s Who of Tony Blair’s friends and business associates. Other members have included Liz Symons, now Baroness Symons, who is, as we shall find, deeply enmeshed in the Libyan business with Blair; Jonathan Powell, who used to be senior consultant with Tony Blair Associates, whom we have already met at meetings with the Sheikh of Kuwait; Sir Nigel Knowles, CEO of DLA Piper, the world’s largest law firm, operating across 29 different companies advising business and governments, with which Symons, Blair and other of their business associates have a longstanding relationship; Sir David Manning, British ambassador to the United States from 2003 to 2007, and a key figure in Blair’s drive to go to war in Iraq, who was, between 1995 and 1998, British ambassador to Tel Aviv and from 2001 a foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Manning was also, like Allen himself and others of Blair’s entourage, a senior adviser with the Monitor Group. Educated at the prestigious Catholic public school Downside and still a devout Roman Catholic, Allen went to Oxford to study classics but quickly changed to Arabic. Today Sir Mark (he was knighted in 2007
) is, according to his LSE profile, ‘one of Britain’s pre-eminent Arabists’ who served in British Foreign Service for thirty years and lived for many years in the Middle East.
That’s true as far as it goes, but it’s a cleaned-up version of the truth: Allen is a former British spy. After studying at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies, believed to be a British ‘spy school’ in a village near Beirut,7 he was posted to Abu Dhabi in 1974, and spent much of the rest of his operational career in the Middle East.8
He fell in love with the sport of falconry, whose best practitioners are to be found among the Bedouin tribes. In the Middle East, Allen was never without his own pet hawks, often peregrine falcons, each worth thousands of pounds.
Allen developed his relationships with the Libyan regime through Saif al-Islam, who studied for a PhD on ‘The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions’ at the LSE, for which he made use of research provided by the Monitor Group – and for which Blair himself offered advice, according to the papers that came to light in Tripoli after Gaddafi’s overthrow.
In 2003, as head of MI6’s counterterrorism unit, Allen and Stephen Kappes of the CIA led the talks that resulted in an end of support for terrorist activity by Gaddafi, and of international sanctions against Libya. In March 2004, Abdelhakim Belhaj, former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, was detained with his heavily pregnant wife in China in 2004. Their friends say Ml6 lured the couple to Bangkok with the promise of a UK visa. They were flown in a CIA plane to Tripoli in 2004. His wife was blindfolded, taken to a cell and ‘chained to the wall by one hand and one leg’ before being ‘taped to a stretcher tightly, making her fear for her baby’ and forced on board the CIA jet.9
Belhaj says he was beaten on arrival in Tripoli, and his wife ‘could no longer feel her baby move in her womb and was concerned that he had died.’ The couple were taken to Tajoura prison, a detention facility in Tripoli operated by the Libyan intelligence services. They were imprisoned and tortured for six years. British agents visited him.
Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask Page 16