Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask

by Francis Beckett

  So the payment was justified on the grounds that it was in the US government’s interest. Giffen pleaded guilty to one low-level offence and received a nominal penalty. A former minister in the Nazarbayev government, Zamanbek K. Nurkadilov, said that Nazarbayev should answer allegations that Kazakh officials had accepted millions of US dollars in bribes from an intermediary for US oil firms in the 1990s. This openness was a grave mistake, since, as we have seen, three weeks before the 2005 presidential election Nurkadilov was assassinated.

  The regime makes no attempt to appear acceptable to its own people, let alone the outside world. An American diplomatic cable in 2010, released by WikiLeaks, reported that in 2007 ‘President Nazarbayev’s son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, celebrated his 41st birthday in grand style. At a small venue in Almaty, he hosted a private concert with some of Russia’s biggest pop-stars. The headliner, however, was Elton John, to whom he reportedly paid one million pounds for this one-time appearance.’2

  Kazakh state businesses are routinely run by favoured cronies of the President. Two of these businesses are in natural resources, a sector where the country is very rich, and include Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) and the Kazakh mining company Kazakhmys. The former is run by two Kyrgyz oligarchs and one Uzbek, the latter by a Kazakh. Both companies have been listed on the London Stock Exchange, bringing Kazakhstan to the attention of the international capital markets.

  Their fates have been very different. ENRC became mired in corruption allegations over African deals, and is now the subject of a probe by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office. Its leaders have been forced to drop their listing and throw themselves at the mercy of Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan. The disastrous adventure has tarnished Nazarbayev’s dream of a modern Kazakh presence in international markets. Moreover, the President’s defensiveness in bringing the company back home to Kazakhstan and out of the public limelight testifies to a fear of scrutiny by democratic agencies. Kazakhmys has kept its nose clean and London continues to invest in this Kazakh poster child.

  Nazarbayev meanwhile has been accused of transferring at least $1 billion worth of oil revenues to his private bank accounts in other countries and his family controls many other key enterprises in Kazakhstan. Those working in the country say that the Nazarbayev regime is in thrall to a coterie of wealthy entrepreneurs and friends of the President. One observer, a lawyer advising Kazakh companies, said that no one in the country obtains wealth except by paying him and his retinue a proportion. They must likewise serve his interests.

  One Russian adviser to a former senior minister in a Nazarbayev government told us: ‘All of the big business people in Kazakhstan are close to the President. They can exist only if they are close to the President. Likewise Mukhtar Ablyazov [the allegedly corrupt former head of BTA Bank] became a billionaire in a few years because he stayed close to the President.’

  Nazarbayev is not the only Kazakh leader to use Tony Blair for his political purposes. Blair is also used by Prime Minister Karim Massimov when he wants to sway the President in favour of one of his proposals; Nazarbayev holds Blair in such high esteem that Blair’s imprimatur boosts Massimov’s standing. Massimov reciprocates the favour, housing Blair’s five-strong local team in his offices. He uses them to scrutinise his proposals before forwarding them on to the President as recommended by Blair. Blair was particularly helpful to Massimov when he sought to raise the profile of Islamic banking in Kazakhstan, leading to a presidential visit to the Gulf and increasing amounts of Gulf money flowing to his country.

  WHAT DOES BLAIR DO FOR HIS MONEY?

  Blair evidently has his work cut out to make the unacceptable acceptable. Yet try it he does. We see Blair acting as an amanuensis for Nazarbayev, writing his speeches, being the door-opener to international leaders who otherwise would not pick up the phone. There are also the consultants with a team of administrators to staff the presidential office and other offices of state.

  As Nazarbayev’s publicist, Blair appeared in a video, a panegyric of praise for the country’s economy and its leader that does not mention once any issues of human rights abuse. In this dreary neo-Stalinist propaganda video, he says that Nazarbayev had displayed ‘the toughness necessary to take the decisions to put the country on the right path, but also a certain degree of subtlety and ingenuity that allowed him to manoeuvre in a region that is fraught with difficulties, and frankly wedged between two great powers, China and Russia.’

  Blair says, ‘It is a country almost unique I would say in its cultural diversity and the way it brings different faiths together, different cultures together.’ The film features extensive interviews with Nazarbayev and Western energy executives praising him, as well as fawning interventions from Blair. ‘In the work that I do there, I’ve found them really smart people, capable, very determined, and very proud of their country,’ he says.

  The film is one hour and seven minutes long and it is hard to see who might have the endurance to view the whole thing. It is an endless parade of talking heads fawning over the great leader. Blair looks pinched and ill, and does not speak with his usual brio; he is looking down, speaking carefully in a hoarse, hushed voice. He looks rather as though he hopes no one he knows will ever see the thing. Several people have pointed out that he seems uneasy rather than displaying the confident and aggressive presence that Nazarbayev must have thought he was buying. He looks ashamed of it. As he should be.

  The video, entitled In the Stirrups of Time and made by Kazakh satellite channel Caspionet, features photos and moving footage of the President and the country and clips of interviews with international business figures and Kazakh ministers.3 Blair is also filmed sitting at a long table at Nazarbayev’s right-hand side, a position normally reserved for subservient ministers. Blair performed the same publicist role in a speech in Astana in May 2012. This is reported on Blair’s website – which does not make clear to whom the speech was made. It puffs up the President again, though in slightly more measured tones:

  The opportunity and the challenge for Kazakhstan in this changing global landscape is very clear. Over the past twenty years since emerging from the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan has grown its income per head of population more than tenfold, taking it from Third World to Second World status, a remarkable achievement. On that day of independence in 1991, it was the world’s fourth-largest nuclear-weapons power and it has since renounced and dismantled them, a great example to the world, as President Obama recently noted …

  However, the challenge is also clear. As Kazakhstan moves to the next level of development – economic, social and political – it has to evolve and reform. This is the pattern the world over and also part of that changing geopolitical landscape …

  The value to Nazarbayev is buying both Blair’s reputation as a moderniser and his connections, even if these are growing colder with each new assignment he acquires. But Blair appears to show the way forward, appears to be impatient with those who block change, appears to be able to sell and fix images.

  In his role as a door opener, especially to the British political scene, Blair’s hand was seen in the visit made by David Cameron, the first by a sitting British head of government to Kazakhstan. In the course of the visit, which took place on 30 June 2013, Nazarbayev reputedly quipped, in answer to a question about human rights raised by Cameron, that he would have voted for him if he had a vote in Britain.

  We see Blair’s role as reputation builder and fixer for the unacceptable face of Kazakhstan in glorious Technicolor following the previously discussed killing of at least fifteen striking workers on 16 December 2011. As described above, the massacre was perpetrated by Kazakh police on oil workers at the western town of Zhanaozen and was prompted by unpaid wages and poor working conditions.

  The President was apparently beside himself about the damage that would be done to the country’s reputation. Nazarbayev was preparing to give a speech at the University of Cambridge that month and wanted a form of words to explain the blot on his record
, so sought the advice of Blair. Blair wrote a letter to Nazarbayev in July 2012 on notepaper headed ‘Office of Tony Blair’ suggesting the President insert several key passages into the speech in order for it to be acceptable to the ‘Western media’.

  The letter (reported in the Daily Telegraph) stated,

  Dear Mr President, here is a suggestion for a paragraph to include in the Cambridge speech. I think it best to meet head on the Zhanaozen issue. The fact is you have made changes following it; but in any event these events, tragic though they were, should not obscure the enormous progress that Kazakhstan has made. Dealing with it [the massacre] in the way I suggest, is the best way for the western media. It will also serve as a quote that can be used in the future setting out the basic case for Kazakhstan [emphasis added].

  The Telegraph reported that Blair enclosed two paragraphs of about five hundred words for Nazarbayev to insert into his speech. The newspaper said, ‘The words written by Mr Blair but spoken by Mr Nazarbayev with some changes were widely picked up at the time. They were used to portray Mr Nazarbayev as a visionary leader who had improved living standards in his homeland.’

  In his delivered speech Nazarbayev gave the Blair script, saying, ‘These are questions of democracy and human rights, which must be properly addressed and have energy devoted to them … I understand and hear what is being said of us by our critics. But we would like this to be done with a certain sense of balance and an objective valuation of the achievements of my country.’

  Blair’s letter to Nazarbayev ended with his offering ‘very best wishes’, saying, ‘I look forward to seeing you in London! Yours ever, Tony Blair.’

  Blair’s letter congratulating the regime on making ‘enormous progress’ was written just a few months after the show trial began of thirty-seven workers and political activists who were arrested following the massacre. They were accused of participating in mass unrest, the destruction and theft of private property and the use of force against government representatives. Thirteen defendants received multi-year prison terms, with one, Roza Tuletaeva, receiving a sentence of seven years in a prison colony from which she was eventually released in November 2014. Sixteen defendants were given suspended sentences, and five were convicted but pardoned. Just three of those on trial were acquitted.

  What we do know is that Blair has many fine words of advice that the President is both happy to have spoken by his consultant and equally happy to ignore himself. In this vein, Blair told Astana university students in 2012,

  The status quo is not an option. There has to be the development of proper systems of democratic participation, with competitive political parties; a responsible but free press; adherence to its hard-won reputation for religious tolerance; judicial and other reforms to enhance the rule of law; and an attack not just on corruption but on the systems in areas like public procurement that sustain it. The recent events at Zhanaozen, with the sharp focus on issues to do with human rights and single-industry towns, emphasise the need for systems that instil confidence. All of these issues have been widely canvassed in speeches and statements by President Nazarbayev and in the interaction with the EU, US and other countries who wish Kazakhstan well and want to see a process of steady political evolution put in place. The challenge is actually to do the reforms – to do them sensibly, preserving the core stability of the country; but do them also in such a way that the reform programme shows a decisive direction of travel.

  Blair will frequently refer to the strength of the country’s economy, noting that in the twenty-five years since Kazakhstan set up a separate country, its commercial sector has grown dramatically. But Kazakhstan is rich in natural resources such as coal, gas and precious metals, so the collapse in the oil price and in precious metals and commodities will hit it badly. In 2013, Kazakhstan had a gross domestic product of $149 billion and a population of 16.3 million. This is minuscule for a country whose land area is greater than that of Western Europe. In the video mentioned above, In the Stirrups of Time, Blair talks about the country’s ‘extraordinary economic potential’.

  Ken Olisa, the former nonexecutive director of ENRC, the Kazakh energy company that was shamed into leaving the London financial market after disclosures of alleged corruption, has noted that ‘every element in the periodic table lies under the Kazakh soil.’4 While prices lie low and the country’s economic system is dogged by corruption and bureaucracy, those metals will stay where they are, rather than benefiting the Kazakh people.

  While part of Blair’s role in Kazakhstan is making the President look good, part is what may be called ‘networking’. That is finding and making friends and putting his friends together, on the basis that they will reward him as well as themselves. Hence, we see him putting the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi with Nazarbayev. It is rumoured that Nazarbayev has invested much of his personal wealth in the oil-rich state.

  Sources in Astana have told the Daily Telegraph that Nazarbayev has given the Abu Dhabi royal family a ninety-nine-year lease on a huge hunting reserve in the south of Kazakhstan, and the Arab leader has reciprocated with a luxury home on an island off the Gulf coast. President Nazarbayev has been a guest of honour at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. As a result of the contact, a regular flight has been established between the two countries. Tony Blair the fixer will have been appreciated.

  Blair’s contribution to the President is his capacity to buy influence, says Steve LeVine, author of The Oil and the Glory, a book about corruption in Kazakhstan. ‘Think about the contacts that you get with a former British prime minister. Why wouldn’t he want them if he can have them?’

  Blair also has a role as matchmaker for friends and clients. This long preceded his consultancy, when he was still Prime Minister, but one might speculate that he had his eye on a future commercial relationship. How else to explain Blair’s facilitating the link-up between Sir Dick Evans, the former chairman of the UK defence firm BAE Systems – a company that had been investigated for bribery in Saudi Arabia – and Nazarbayev while the Kazakh was on a state visit to the UK? BAE systems was run by Evans. Two years after Evans ceased to be chairman, Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General during Blair’s administration between 2001 and 2007, pulled the investigation by the Serious Fraud Office into bribes involving the Al-Yamama contract, for $40 billion worth of military plane sales to Saudi Arabia. Blair cited the threat by Saudi Arabia to withhold intelligence about Middle Eastern terrorism from the UK as the reason for closing down the investigation.

  Blair answered Nazarbayev’s need for an industrialist by putting him together with Evans and, in 2006, the bluff northerner became chairman of the Kazakh state holding company, Samruk, which owns most of the major companies in the country, including the national rail and postal service, the state oil and gas company, the state uranium company, the airline Air Astana and numerous financial groups. In 2008 Evans was replaced as chairman, while remaining the ‘independent’ director. Evans oversaw the restructuring of Air Astana for the Kazakh government in 2005 using the services of the consultancy McKinsey, with BAE having a significant minority shareholding in the company.

  Evans told the Spectator magazine in February 2008, ‘I was introduced to Nazarbayev on one of his early trips to the UK by Tony Blair while I was still at BAE.’ That meeting led to BAE helping to restructure aviation in Kazakhstan and taking 50 per cent of Air Astana, which is a joint venture with Samruk-Kazyna, the country’s sovereign wealth fund and investment agency. ‘The President was pressing hard for me to come, and he wore me down. I was over here on a review of the airline, we had lunch at the palace and he said, “We want to talk to you again about Samruk,” and there and then at that lunch, after a previous nine months’ warm-up, I said, “Fine, OK, I’ll do it.” I don’t think I could’ve said yes had I not seen a lot of them and got to know them quite well.’

  Evans is less than flattering about the country’s top officials. ‘It’s a lot easier for guys like myself to question the very senior people here about why they a
re doing something in a particular way. The whole culture here, for local people, is not to do that. When you go down underneath the top level of government, there’s what you might call a permafrost of the Soviet bureaucracy which is alive and very well.’ Evans was re-elected as an independent director on the Samruk board in January 2014.

  It’s not clear what ‘reforms’ or ‘progress’ Blair constantly refers to. In 2011 Samruk-Kazyna hired Lord Mandelson, architect of Blair’s election victories, to give two speeches at its events. At one of the conferences in Astana, in October 2010, Mandelson reportedly lavished praise on Samruk-Kazyna, saying, ‘I want to stress a special role [it] played as a saviour of the world economy.’

  Blair’s overall goal is to assist Kazakh President Nazarbayev in presenting his country as modern and dynamic. The moderniser who understands international markets and the challenges emerging countries face will lend allure to the little-known ‘-stan’, made famous by Borat, in the person of actor-comedian Sasha Baron Cohen, as lingering in the dark ages. In the public mind, Kazakhstan is easily confused with Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan. The common thread between all these ‘-stans’ is their addiction to despots. These leaders enabled them to surface as independent states from the Soviet Union, but they would be an obstacle to their becoming members of the wider global community. Jonathan Aitken, the writer of a fawning biography of Nazarbayev, Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan, recalls in his book a press conference in November 2006, when the British Prime Minister and the President stood side by side in Downing Street, and Nazarbayev was evidently discomfited by the Borat caricature. When asked to comment, he said, ‘The film was created by a comedian, so let’s laugh at it … any publicity is good publicity.’5