The Foundation’s income in the year ending 31 October 2012 was £1,818,151 and at that time it employed eleven staff.
Cherie Blair is dedicated to building businesses and making money. Her accent has gone from Liverpool to London, her style from political wife to lead business partner. Today the language is that of profits, whether it is funding private healthcare clinics in the poorer parts of the UK or guiding businesses through the world’s riskiest markets,
To achieve this, Cherie has two routes. One is through developing and commercialising her legal expertise. The other is through financial investment. She is at the same time a hard-nosed consultant to countries and companies and a businesswoman and manager.
Cherie Blair tries to operate beneath the radar. Business people in emerging markets have their enemies in the marketplace but high-profile political folk in business have double the trouble: business competitors and ideological foes.
PRIVATE SECURITY AND PRIVATE HEALTH
One vehicle that Cherie Blair uses is Omnia Strategy, a consultancy she founded in 2011, which makes its money from her claim to have deep intelligence knowhow and plugged-in intelligence sources. Another vehicle is Mee Healthcare, a firm that sets up a one-shop-suits-all medical, optical and dental service in British supermarkets.
Through Omnia Strategy, Cherie has advised governments including Albania and Bahrain, a pressure group in Nigeria and a company in Egypt. Omnia bears comparison to groups like Control Risks and Kroll, which help companies manage political and security risks, but with a legal rather than straightforwardly security emphasis. Synergies between Omnia and Tony Blair’s political and security apparatus are inevitable, although the principals are careful to discount such suggestions.
Yet office location provides some support for such a proposition. Omnia Strategy occupies anonymous offices at 1 Great Cumberland Place, near Marble Arch in Central London, alongside Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation, Cherie’s Foundation for Women, her son Nicky Blair’s company (we’ll come to that) and (bizarrely) the London office of her son Euan Blair’s employer (we’ll come to that, too). This is a fortress-like building, overlooking Hyde Park, where security is tight and no one enters without codes and prearranged meetings. The Omnia Strategy website, like Tony Blair’s various organisations, provides no postal address or phone number.
The medical end of the Cherie Blair portfolio took off in January 2012, when she was reported to be seeking £65 million to help fund a chain of private health clinics. She had joined forces with an American fund manager to raise $100 million from investors on both sides of the Atlantic. She was working with the Allele Fund, a private-equity outfit founded by Dr Gail Lese, a Republican-supporting businesswoman. Cherie and Lese are said to be close partners. The business is based in the Cayman Islands and in Delaware, a notorious US onshore tax haven.
Lese’s skill in business management was demonstrated during a brief stint at Fidelity, where she made record returns in record times. Lese, an American, is a qualified doctor and the Allele Fund website says,
Dr. Lese has a deep commitment to public service and volunteerism. Her extensive volunteer service has included serving on the Board of Directors of the Mass Mentoring Partnership, the American Red Cross of Cape Cod and Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Cape Cod; tutoring and mentoring students in the Boston, Los Angeles, and New York public school systems; founding multiple community service programs including a scholarship program to help economically disadvantaged students attend college; service as a volunteer physician at the L.A. Free Clinic; and helping to procure and grant wishes for terminally ill children with the Make a Wish Foundation. Dr. Lese has received numerous recognitions for her distinguished leadership and impact in public service.
The company’s motto is, ‘Your one-stop connection for quality health, wellness and life’. Its strapline states, ‘we will serve you with integrity in all we do’.
The company’s brand name is Mee Healthcare and its website proudly proclaims, ‘Mee provides a range of premium healthcare and wellbeing services at accessible prices.’ Mee’s innovative centres offer GPs, dentists, hearing and eye experts and even pampering services such as manicures and pedicures, all under one roof. Cherie Blair told the Financial Times, ‘While this venture is a commercial one, it is not about replacing the NHS or profiteering, but complementing the services it already offers.’3
Maybe. But it is private medicine, and it will, whatever way you look at it, benefit from moves towards NHS privatisation.
Allele says its aim is to ‘invest in, build, and grow, a variety of leading international businesses which are committed to making a difference and helping people globally. The Fund’s team takes significant operational roles within fund portfolio companies to steward them to success.’ One investor in Mee Healthcare is Brooks Newmark, a member of the Treasury Select Committee and the Conservative MP for Braintree since the 2005 general election.
While Mee puts Cherie Blair in a very visible position on the high street, Omnia stays firmly out of sight. Its ‘advisory panel’ includes Peter Wilson, a director at Protection Group International (PGI), and he gives Cherie access to ‘experience and expertise from UK government, intelligence, military personnel and commercial organisations’. Wilson tells us his role as a member of Omnia’s advisory panel is unpaid, and he has ceased to be a director of the firm.
Wilson, who worked in the Foreign Office and McKinsey, has investments in a number of hi-tech companies. He describes himself as an adviser to the British government on political reform in developing countries. Wilson wrote a very right-wing book called Make Poverty Business, which claims to construct ‘a rigorous profit-making argument for multinational corporations to do more business with the poor. It takes economic development out of the corporate social responsibility ghetto and places it firmly in the core business interests of the corporation.’ Wilson said that PGI had ‘no business connections’ with Omnia.
Cherie Booth QC, described on the company’s website as Cherie Blair CBE, is the chair of Omnia, whose website says it is a
Pioneering international law firm that provides strategic counsel to governments, corporate and private clients. We tackle complex problems that require an innovative and multi-disciplinary approach … we provide a bespoke service and carefully select a tailored project team which may include solicitors, barristers, corporate general counsel, former CEOs, strategy consultants, diplomats, economists, investment bankers and communications specialists from across the globe.
In fact, Omnia Strategy has a rather wider remit of advisers and this includes ‘private investigators’, who are hired to provide intelligence expertise on countries, markets and individuals. Wilson’s profile says,
We [Omnia] are a legal strategy consultancy that helps you achieve your international goals through our integrated expertise in law, governance and economics. We work with you to translate and embed global standards throughout your organisation. We help governments to attract international support and investment by strengthening laws, institutions and practices. We help businesses from emerging markets to become internationally respected, successful companies by strengthening governance, structures and practices.
Cherie’s colleagues at Omnia include Sofia Wellesley, who worked at the Libyan Investment Authority, which Tony Blair and his client JP Morgan got to know very well in the days of the late Colonel Gaddafi. There, she ‘project managed a team to start up the operations of the sovereign wealth fund and to oversee assignments that formulated governance, human resource and asset allocation strategies.’ Wellesley is quite young – still only thirty-one in 2014 – but definitely out of the top drawer: she is descended from the Duke of Wellington and married James Blunt in 2014.
Another partner in Omnia is Julia Yun Hulme, a former lawyer for Tamoil Group – the brand name of Dutch oil company Oilinvest – where she was ‘in charge of all legal aspects of the company including corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, arbitration, compli
ance and restructuring.’ Oilinvest itself was controlled by a Libyan holding company until civil unrest led to the holding company being wound up in March 2011. This appeared to leave the company without an ultimate owner.
Cementing the company’s Middle Eastern links, Cherie recruited Laura Edwards, a recent Cambridge law graduate, as an analyst to Omnia in August 2013. Edwards is listed as an editor for the ‘Proposed Constitutional Framework for the Republic of Tunisia’, a document put together by Cambridge University’s Wilberforce Society, a think tank that aims to connect students and ‘leading policy makers’.4
Omnia is known to use former intelligence officers and investigative companies to conduct due diligence.
Among its clients is the government of Bahrain. The Sunday Times reported in February 2012:
Cherie Blair is offering her services as a legal and human rights consultant to the Bahraini regime, which cracked down on protests last year. Blair, who visited the country in November, is promoting her services through Omnia Strategy, her consultancy. Other Middle East regimes facing the threat of revolution are being offered her services as an adviser on legal reforms … The consultancy said in a statement that its work was intended to help Bahrain implement reforms which will help safeguard human rights. However, opposition groups are sceptical about the regime’s commitment to reform.5
So they might be. Her husband says the same thing about his Kazakhstan client.
According to a Human Rights Watch report published on 21 January 2014, Bahrain has
increased restrictions on the exercise of core human rights like freedom of speech, assembly, and association. Security forces arbitrarily arrested scores of people and authorities detained and prosecuted activists. There were continuing credible reports of torture and ill-treatment in detention. The government failed to carry out key recommendations of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, which at the government’s request examined the government’s and security forces’ response to mass protests in 2011.6
It seems sad that a distinguished, able and passionate human-rights lawyer should end up shilling for the likes of the government of Bahrain, which, during the Arab Spring, relied on imported Saudi troops to keep democracy at bay.
Other Middle Eastern clients include the Egyptian construction company Orascom Construction Industries and its London operation called OCI (UK), based at Cork Street, in London’s Mayfair. OCI says on its website that it targets large industrial and infrastructure projects, principally in Egypt and North Africa. It does major commercial, industrial and infrastructure projects throughout Europe and the Middle East and it pursues institutional projects in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Omnia advised the government of Albania in 2012 and 2013 when it was facing a claim from a firm of oil developers called Sky Petroleum. Sky, which is based in Texas, was claiming that the country had illegally stopped a licence it had been granted to explore for oil. Omnia Strategy won the case and Sky had to pay Albania’s costs.
Africa is another marketplace for Omnia. The Bakassi Support Group reportedly hired Omnia in 2012 to prepare a legal brief to review the International Court of Justice’s judgments in a hearing in Nigeria’s capital Abuja on its claim for lost territory, whose sovereignty had been ceded to Cameroon.
Cherie Blair is the founder of Matrix Chambers, but Omnia Strategy takes her closer to the commercial and security application of law, especially in insecure jurisdictions. Matrix Chambers’ website says she is a
high-profile expert in discrimination, public law, media and information law and employment law. She has appeared in the European Court of Justice and in Commonwealth jurisdictions, and also lectures internationally on human rights. Appointed QC in 1995, she is a Recorder in the County Court and Crown Court, a Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn and an Honorary Bencher of King’s Inn, Dublin. She is also an accredited Advanced Mediator under the ADR Chambers/Harvard Law Project and an Elite Mediator with Clerksroom.
Cherie Blair sees the law and enterprise as her route to business leadership. These businesses, it seems to us, tell us two things about Cherie Blair. First, she is, as she has always been, her own woman. She never fitted into the traditional pattern of the prime-ministerial wife. A seriously clever and independent-minded woman, she has chosen to do her own thing. And Omnia is nothing at all like Tony Blair Associates. It utilises her skills and knowledge – and, although it clearly benefits from the contacts she has made as the wife of the PM, it is the sort of work she might well have done if she had not been married to a prime minister (except that she would probably have become a judge).
The second is less comfortable. Why on earth is this woman, always more left-wing than her husband and more committed to the welfare state, hawking private healthcare products around the globe? And why is she helping the dictators who run Bahrain with their repressive policies?
EUAN AND NICKY BLAIR
Cherie is actively involved in the careers of her sons Euan and Nicky, both of whom have offices in the concrete tower at 1 Great Cumberland Place, overlooking Hyde Park – an office building that may yet become known as the Blair Tower.
If you look on the plate at the entrance, you would have no idea that this was what went on inside. Other occupants of the building have their company names on the plate – Gherson Solicitors and Michael Berg and Partners, chartered surveyors, on Floor 2, Oil Spill Response Ltd on Floor 1, and so on – but there is no mention at all of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, and the occupants of Floor 7 are given simply as ‘CBFW’ and ‘CBO’. The first must be the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, and the second, probably, the Cherie Blair Organisation.
Cherie Blair’s eldest son Euan, born in 1984, started by working in merchant banking with Morgan Stanley, but then took a job with the huge Australian employment agency Sarina Russo Job Access, which started business as an academy in 1979 and has made Sarina Russo a multimillionaire. He started as an adviser, but he is listed at the time of writing as acting CEO UK, in which post he works in the company’s London office.
His profile on their website reads: ‘Before joining Sarina Russo Job Access, Euan worked at Morgan Stanley where he helped raise funding of more than $60Bn for UK companies including Marks & Spencer, National Grid, Vodafone, and Unilever. He has also advised on funding strategies for a number of public sector and charitable clients including Transport for London, Network Rail and the Wellcome Trust.’
Sarina Russo herself is now part of the Blair inner circle – a guest at Cherie’s sixtieth-birthday party in 2014 and at Euan’s wedding, and a friend of both Tony and Cherie. She told an Australian radio station all about it, in a rather cringe-making interview down the line from London:7 ‘It’s really extraordinary – the Blairs are just like the royal family here in the UK.’
As for Euan, she seemed to suggest he takes after his father in being driven by a desire to help the less fortunate: ‘He actually gave up merchant banking … and he was really searching to get a feel of, you know, the people in this country, the homeless, the drug addicts, you know, the disadvantaged. It’s obvious it’s in his blood and he really wants to make a difference, and he’s got the beautiful wife, Suzanne, who’s very much into social finance, and she helps prisoners to get finance so that when they leave jail they’ve got some sort of financial stability.’
How did he get the job?
‘Well, what happened was, he came to me for career advice … and a couple of days, a week later he says, I’d like to work for your company, and he’s told everyone it’s the happiest job he’s ever had.’
The truth is a little more complicated. Euan Blair has had a meteoric rise in Russo’s company: as has been noted, a few months after joining to do business development, he is now the acting UK CEO. This company is very big in Australia but only started working on the English market in 2009. It has five offices in the West Midlands, including its head office in Coventry.
It is its London office from which Euan works though. Russo’s nephe
w, Michael Pennisi, is one of his colleagues in that office. It is, presumably, not a mere coincidence that Euan Blair’s employer’s office is on the same floor of the same office block as his mother’s and his brother’s companies. But what exactly is the connection between Sarina Russo and the Blairs?
There is also an office in Wembley, where surprisingly the Tony Blair Faith Foundation also has an office.
Euan’s company owes its meteoric rise in Britain – it now has eight offices and employs almost one hundred people – to one contract, and that is a government contract. It is to do with the welfare-to-work programme. The government sends unemployed young people to the company, and the company trains them in such matters as how to write a CV, employability skills and how to dress for interviews. It does so as a subcontractor of Serco, the enormous government outsourcing company.
The company’s ‘vision’ is, according to its website, ‘to constantly innovate and excel at the delivery of exceptional recruitment, education and training services to all clients, candidates and students. This is achieved by the delivery of superior services to all of our customers and fellow staff.’
Euan Blair was at first based in the Coventry office, and was attending meetings of the local constituency Labour Party.8 There was speculation that his ambition was to be a Labour MP, and that working for Ms Russo might look better to a local Labour Party than working for a merchant bank. However, the Coventry connection is now a little academic, since Geoffrey Robinson (born in 1938), whose Coventry North West seat Euan is thought to have had his eye on, announced that he intended to stand again in the 2015 general election. Euan no longer works in Coventry, and his parliamentary ambitions were then thought to rest in Bootle. However, if Euan ever intended to be a Labour parliamentary candidate, he had given the idea up by 2014.
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