Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask

by Francis Beckett

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  12 www.caijing.com.cn, 22 June 2005: http://english.caijing.com.cn/

  2005-06-22/100013763.html

  13 The Guardian, 10 May 2012: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/

  2012/may/10/mandelson-advises-company-rainforest

  CHAPTER NINE

  SELLING INFLUENCE TO THE ARAB WORLD

  ‘Emails between McKillen’s staff and Tony Blair Associates reveal the ex-Prime Minister’s firm was willing to approach leaders in Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman in the search for finance. Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, was also willing to offer his help.’

  – SIMON NEVILLE IN THE GUARDIAN, 11 MAY 2012.

  Shortly before Blair left office, two of his closest political friends became paid advisers to Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC), the huge Palestinian-owned construction multinational with subsidiary firms in the Middle East, Britain and America, which we have met in connection with several of Blair’s activities in Chapters 1 and 7.

  Stephen Byers, the former Trade and Industry Secretary, and Baroness Symons, the former Foreign Office Minister responsible for the Middle East, have both been paid as consultants to the company. Byers is also chairman of a British CCC subsidiary, AKWA, which builds sewage works. Symons is ‘international consultant’ to CCC, which donated large sums to the Conservatives ahead of the 2010 UK general election. By that time neither Byers nor Symons was bothered about this – their friend Tony Blair had been displaced by their enemy Gordon Brown.

  In February 2011 contempt-of-court proceedings were brought against CCC for failing to comply with court orders that have frozen its assets in six different countries.1 On 5 May 2011, Justice Christopher Clarke found two companies in the Consolidated Contractors Group of Companies guilty of contempt of court in ten instances for breaching orders obtained to assist enforcement. A law report noted,

  CCC has adopted what has been described as a ‘determined and ruthless’ strategy of taking every possible point to resist enforcement. Related enforcement proceedings have occupied the High Court, the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court on almost 100 days since the judgment on liability, resulting in significant clarifications and developments of the law in the field of jurisdiction and enforcement. Enforcement proceedings are also ongoing in ten other countries.

  The company faces an anti-suit injunction, three receivership orders, five freezing injunctions and orders requiring the provision of affidavits of assets. CCC was in contempt of these orders on 14 different counts, including by failing to provide information and receiving revenues in breach of the receivership orders. The High Court found the allegations of contempt to be proved on ten counts, describing them as ‘serious and deliberate’. The question of sanctions has been adjourned, but the court gave a stark warning to the defendants that if they fail to purge their contempt, they are likely to face significant, continuing, multi-million pound fines.2

  CCC had been paying Byers as an adviser since 2005, when he was still an MP (he remained in Parliament until 2010). From the time of his election to Parliament in 1992, Byers was one of Blair’s most ardent supporters, identifying himself as an outrider for the New Labour project, floating ideas on Blair’s behalf to test reaction. So, once Blair became leader in 1994, Byers’s rise was rapid, and he joined the cabinet in July 1998, as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. After the sudden resignation of Peter Mandelson, Byers became Trade and Industry Secretary in December 1998, then, after the 2001 general election, Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government & the Regions.

  But he ran into serious trouble. It was his adviser, Jo Moore, who sent the infamous email suggesting that the 11 September 2001 attacks on the USA made it ‘a very good day to get out anything we want to bury’. A leaked email from the department’s head of news, Martin Sixsmith, advised her not to try to bury any more bad news on the day of Princess Margaret’s funeral. Moore and Sixsmith both had to resign – but Sixsmith announced that Byers had insisted on his departure as his price to pay for losing Moore. Blair tried to hang on to his old ally, but Byers was doomed, and, after a couple of controversies over policies his colleagues thought far too right-wing, Byers was forced to resign.

  Two subsequent incidents made him look unendurably sleazy and greedy. It emerged that he had claimed more than £125,000 in second-home allowances for a London flat owned by his partner, where the MP lived rent-free. Then he was caught out by undercover journalists on the Dispatches programme who were posing as lobbyists from an international company. Byers described himself to them as a ‘cab for hire’ and offered to lobby his parliamentary contacts in support of the fictitious company for a payment of between £3,000 and £5,000 per day. He told them he had helped National Express and Tesco through his relationships with Transport Secretary Lord Adonis and Business Secretary Peter Mandelson. National Express and Tesco denied this. Byers later denied it too. But it was certainly true that he had lobbied Adonis, for Adonis himself later confirmed it.3

  ‘I still get a lot of confidential information because I’m still linked to No. 10,’ he told the journalists. If necessary, ‘we could have a word with Tony’.

  Byers the politician was finished, but Byers the businessman was only just getting started. How many words he has had with Tony since he left Parliament in 2010 we do not know, but the extent to which his business interests and those of his old boss overlap is remarkable.

  He had worked for CCC since 2005, so the first five years of his association with the company were while he was still a Labour MP. In 2010, the year he left Parliament, he faxed a note of a meeting that he held with a CCC director from his office in the House of Commons.

  In this fax, which was leaked to the Guardian, he discussed ways of helping the company secure business opportunities in Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Kazakhstan and Libya. The document shows how Byers was active in establishing ‘good relationships’ with the presidents of Nigeria, as well as with Blair’s friend and client, the president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev (see Chapter 5), and establishing ‘strategic partnerships’ with companies such as RTZ.4

  In November 2005, Byers flew out to Kazakhstan with his Commons researcher Philippa Menzies at CCC’s expense. He paid another parliamentary researcher, Ellen Broome, to work on CCC projects, according to the Register of MPs’ Research Assistants.

  Byers also became a director of the company set up to promote Ukraine’s membership of the EU by Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk. This happened around the time Pinchuk was donating heavily to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and Blair was lobbying for Ukrainian entry to the EU. It is a moot point how much Pinchuk is currently donating to Blair’s activities. Interpipe, the pipework company that was the origin for much of Pinchuk’s fortune, was audited by Ernst & Young in 2013, who revealed that ‘the Group’s current liabilities exceed its current assets by $649.1 million’. That amount, the auditors warn, is a ‘material uncertainty that may cast significant doubt about the Group’s ability to continue as a going concern’. We shall meet Mr Pinchuk, and his near-bankrupt business, again in Chapter 12: ‘Doing God’.

  This is how it happened that, two days before the Scottish referendum in 2014, when every other British political grandee was north of the border, Blair issued his magisterial advice to the Scottish people from Yalta in the Crimea. He was there to speak at YES – the annual Yalta Economic Strategy meeting, promoted by Pinchuk to press the case for Ukraine’s EU membership.

  Blair’s many friends in Qatar have also benefited from Byers’s acumen; we have been told. Blair himself has an ambivalent relationship with Qatar. One wealthy US investor and businessman who used to be close to Blair told us, ‘One day he is damning the Qataris but six months before he is getting paid $5 million for one meeting with the Prime Minister. He sort of flops around from one place to another.

  ‘The guy just cannot not be in the press. He cannot stand not to be making news. So he wi
ll say anything. He will say the Qataris are terrorists after he had taken a $5 million payment from them. He is all over the place.’

  The Qatari regime does not have an enviable human-rights record. On 27 August 2014 Shadow International Development Minister Alison McGovern wrote to University College London (UCL) about labour standards and the possible use of forced labour on its campus in Qatar. McGovern wrote,

  Too many migrant workers in Qatar are subject to forced labour, poverty pay and appalling working and housing conditions under the kafala system. Rightly, there has been a lot of attention focused on what is happening to workers building the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup, but the truth is that this exploitative labour system permeates much of Qatar’s economy. All British firms and organisations operating in Qatar need to look carefully at the way the workers they rely on are treated, and universities like UCL can be no exception to that.

  Under the kafala system, Qatari employers can prevent their foreign workers from leaving the country or changing jobs. The rules surrounding the exit permit that foreign workers need to leave the country were likened to modern-day slavery by human rights groups. Qatar has now promised to reform the system in 2015.

  The TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said in Union News, ‘Qatar has become a byword for modern slavery, and its disregard for migrant workers’ rights should worry any responsible employer. Whether they are builders, footballers or cleaners, Qatar must treat everyone with respect and dignity. UCL can’t just wash its hands because the workers aren’t directly employed by them. Ethical employment means ensuring decent work at every step in the global supply chain, and the university should respond swiftly and positively to the concerns expressed by so many.’5

  UCL told the International Trade Union Confederation that the forced labour it had identified concerned people employed by subcontracting firms used by the Qatar Foundation – a client of the Qatari government’s favourite lobbyist, Brown Lloyd James (BLJ), whose chief executive for the Middle East and Asia is a former Blair staffer, John Watts. Watts worked for the Labour Party before being recruited into Downing Street to be responsible for ‘organizing the Prime Minister’s external presentation at government events, public meetings and visits within the UK and globally in front of the British and international media,’ according to his CV. In July 2007, when Blair left Downing Street, Watts left too and joined BLJ.

  By 2012 BLJ listed among its clients the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, as well as several Qatari clients: the Qatar Foundation, Doha Bank, Education City Qatar, Qatargas, Qatar Chamber of Commerce, Qatar Financial Centre, Qatari Diar, Qatarlum and the State of Qatar.

  Other clients frequently have a Blair connection. One of them, a charity called the Loomba Foundation, has Cherie Blair as its president, and asked Tony Blair to make a speech for it after he left Downing Street. The speech never happened. An unconfirmed rumour has it that this is because he demanded a £500,000 fee.

  But BLJ’s proudest achievement was bringing the FIFA World Cup to Qatar for 2022. We asked Byers if he had helped BLJ to secure the event. He wrote back,

  With regard to the Qatar 2022 World Cup, I’m afraid you appear to have been misinformed. I had no involvement in any capacity in the bid from Qatar and have never done any work in any capacity for Brown Lloyd James. I trust this makes the position clear and is helpful. Perhaps you could let me know exactly what it is you have heard about me and I can then give you any further confirmation that you might require about the lack of any role on my part.

  So, we asked, was he doing anything at all for Qatar? Had he been advising Qatar on transport or railways? Was he still connected to CCC? Byers replied,

  In relation to your further questions I am struggling to identify the public interest. I resigned as Secretary of State for Transport over 12 years ago and stood down from the House of Commons over 4 years ago. Since leaving public office, I and those closest to me have greatly valued the privacy we now have. I know you will respect this.

  So why had he given us so emphatic and definite an answer to our earlier question? ‘I was happy to reply to your questions concerning the Qatar World Cup bid because the time line was such that it could have been relevant to my membership of the House of Commons.’ This means that the timeline on the other matters is such that it clearly cannot relate to his Commons membership.

  After he stood down at the 2010 general election, he did not have to declare anything publicly because he was no longer a public figure. But that does not mean that he should expect privacy for all his business dealings. As we have noted, his parliamentary career ended in tatters after he was investigated by John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, for boasting he was ‘a cab for hire’ seeking £3,000 to £5,000 a day for lobbying. The Standards and Privileges Committee concluded in 2010:

  We recommend that, for committing a particularly serious breach of the Code of Conduct, Mr Stephen Byers’ entitlement to a Parliamentary photopass be suspended for two years, with effect from 1 January 2011. If Mr Byers had not accepted that his conduct was wrong and had not apologised in such unequivocal terms, we would have recommended that this entitlement be withdrawn for a much longer period.

  As for not replying to our question about whether he has still got a role with CCI, Consolidated Contractors International, part of the Consolidated Contractors Company, it is truly relevant. After the 2010 general election he admitted in a letter to the Parliamentary Commissioner, who was finishing his inquiry into Byers’s activities, that he was working for CCI, negotiating a dispute between it and BP over the costs of an Azerbaijan–Turkey oil pipeline. And this was while he was an MP, and he did declare his connection, but it has obviously continued.

  He had boasted about his role with the company in his undercover conversations with the Dispatches programme:

  I’m a consultant to a company called Consolidated Contractors International … And they’re sort of, it’s a family, it’s a, that still controls the company, but they’re the twelfth biggest construction company in the world. They’re bigger than Bechtel, or Balfour Beatty, or whatever, so they’re very significant. And particularly … sort of Middle East and the Gulf, and they’re growing their influence in the former Soviet States as well, so Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, those areas … Because what they do is, they do a lot of construction linked with oil and gas, so, I’m doing a fair bit of work with them. I chair a water services company called Aqua, which is based in, in North Yorkshire, but does three-quarters of its work in the Gulf … Desalination, sewage treatment, the big, you know the palm development in Dubai? … We, we do all the sewage for that.

  I chair a group in Ukraine, which is a not-for-profit organisation. I get paid for chairing it, which is to get Ukraine to look towards Europe really … rather than towards Moscow.

  …[O]ur, main backers are a couple of oligarchs in Ukraine who’ve done pretty well, but recognise that, in terms of where their future’s going to be, it’s not providing steel to Moscow, it’s going to be providing, it’s going to be getting access to the European market. And having a more open economy, and they see that and so. They, they have made, they’re very good, but they just put the money up and they just allow us, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a board of six of us, and they allow us, pretty much, to run it, you know, so.

  I’ve got other opportunities, so I’ve got, so there’s a big railway about to be built in the United Arab Emirates, called Union Railway. They’ve approached me to go on their sort of international advisory board. Which would be, which would be very interesting, and is remarkably well paid. So I’ll do that. Because in reality, I mean, where my strengths have developed has been very much the sort of Middle East and the Gulf.

  The real difference seems to be that, while he can tell us, no doubt truthfully, that he did not work for the World Cup bid, he is, like Blair and BLJ, on a Gulf gravy train, advising small oil-rich nations, in this case on transport and other issues. He admits it himself, but h
as since said he did not get a job with Union Railway.

  We are not impressed by the plea for privacy. Consultancy agreements between former cabinet ministers and oil-rich states are not private. It is perfectly reasonable to ask whether he is still doing work in the Middle East and Near East. No businessman would expect privacy over this, otherwise there would no reporting of business deals in the Western world.

  As for his family, we have never made and do not intend to make any enquiries about them.

  The conversation with the undercover reporters throws an interesting light on Byers’s and Blair’s first tentative steps in the Middle East, while Blair was still Prime Minister and Byers still in the government. He said,

  But I mean I’m, even now I’m sort of surprised – and I say this to him – at how much sort of respect, almost affection that people [in the Gulf states] have got [for Blair]. I don’t, and I don’t quite know why, it seems quite interesting. Because actually he did very little. I, because I remember at the time saying to him, he should visit the Gulf more often, because actually he only went there once as Prime Minister … in the final couple of months of his prime-ministership. Because the first time he was supposed to go, he cancelled and actually sent me instead, for a sort of day trip, overnight there, then a day, then overnight back. And then there’s a couple of other reasons. So he, he’s been to Saudi a couple of times, but sort of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar; and the UAE, he didn’t, he didn’t go to very often at all.

  BLJ clients also included, as it puts it, ‘various heads of state and government officials from around the world’. One of these, not mentioned on the BLJ website, was President Assad of Syria. A document published by WikiLeaks offers BLJ’s advice to Assad, dated 19 May 2012. It begins by saying,