Happier times: The Blairs seen side-by-side in 1994 – three years before Tony was elected Prime Minister
Over the years, her accent has gone from Liverpool to London. Today her 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,
Originally, of course, she was primarily a lawyer, notably as a QC at Matrix Chambers, the group of barristers specialising in human rights that she helped to found. Its website describes her as an ‘expert in discrimination, public law, media and information law and employment law’. She has appeared in the European Court of Justice and is also a Recorder (a judge) in the county court and crown court. She lectures internationally on human rights.
DAY CAMPBELL ASKED FOR FREEBIE PIANO
When the Blairs’ daughter Kathryn, now a barrister, showed some musical curiosity in the early 2000s, Alastair Campbell was asked to contact Chappells, the musical instrument supplier, to track down a suitable instrument for the PM’s daughter.
Campbell suggested to the head of piano sales that the company might care to donate a baby grand piano worth several thousands of pounds to the Prime Minister’s family.
The head of piano sales dismissed the request, telling Campbell in no uncertain terms that he could come in and buy a piano like everyone else, and put the phone down.
Then, in 2008, the year after leaving Downing Street, she set up an international charity, the Cherie Blair Foundation For Women, to provide female entrepreneurs round the world with access to business development support, networks, finance and technology.
Compared with the funding arrangements of her husband’s deliberately opaque charities, Cherie’s is an open book. Its income in 2012 was £1,818,151 and it employs 11 staff. It even lists donors, which include big commercial names such as ExxonMobil, as well as one of Tony’s employer, banker JP Morgan.
The biggest donor is American media tycoon Haim Saban, the passionately pro-Israel billionaire who also funds the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. So it is hardly surprising to find Cherie’s foundation is very active in Israel.
Cherie goes there with Saban’s wife Cheryl to talk up their funding of places at Western Galilee College for women to study economics, accounting and business administration, and how to provide Israeli business women with capital.
More recently, however, she has set about combining the law and private enterprise in ways that are surprising for someone of her political background and beliefs.
One SUCH enterprise is Mee Healthcare, a firm that sets up a one-shop-suits-all medical, optical and dental service in British supermarkets.
Separate lives: Tony and Cherie, pictured in 2000, do not work together and are seldom seen together
This took off in 2012, when she was reported to be seeking £65 million to help fund a chain of private health clinics. She joined forces with an American private equity outfit to raise money from investors on both sides of the Atlantic.
Her partner is the Allele Fund, founded by Dr Gail Lese, a Republican-supporting American businesswoman. The business is based in the Cayman Islands and in Delaware, a notorious U.S. onshore tax haven.
YACHT TRIPS AND FAVOURS FROM CHAMPAGNE KING
Two years after Tony Blair stepped down as PM, along came a six-figure contract for the luxury goods firm LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
Blair owed this to a contact he made during his premiership, when he became close friends with France’s richest man and LVMH’s head, Bernard Arnault.
The two became such good friends that Blair’s children were invited to do work experience with Arnault while their father was still in office, and stayed at Arnault’s Paris residence.
It started with an invitation for Arnault to Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official country house in Buckinghamshire. Soon afterwards, in the summer of 2004, Blair’s son Nicky did work experience at LVMH’s Krug vineyard in the Champagne region of France.
A year later, one of Blair’s other sons, Euan, did work experience at a French radio station owned by Arnault, and lived in a luxury apartment paid for by him.
In February 2007, when Blair was still PM, his daughter Kathryn stayed in Arnault’s Parisian mansion while undertaking a three-month language course at the Sorbonne.
In September 2007, soon after Blair had left Downing Street, the Blairs stayed aboard Arnault’s yacht, Amadeus, in the Mediterranean. Arnault accompanied Tony and Cherie when they had an audience with the Pope at the Vatican.
So did Blair’s former chief of staff Jonathan Powell, his closest aide during the Downing Street years. Powell’s brother Lord Powell is chairman of the LVMH offshoot LVMH Services Ltd.
As we’ve seen, Powell followed Blair out of office to become a senior adviser in Tony Blair Associates. He was the only person with Blair when he visited the Emir of Kuwait in his role as Middle East peace envoy, and picked up his most lucrative contract.
Mee Healthcare proudly proclaims that it provides ‘a range of premium healthcare and wellbeing services at accessible prices’. Its centres have GPs, dentists, hearing and eye experts under one roof. Cherie 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.’
Maybe. But it is private medicine, and it will benefit from moves towards NHS privatisation.
One investor in Mee Healthcare is Tory MP Brooks Newmark — who says he will quit as an MP at the next election, and who had to resign as a junior minister last October after revelations that he was sending sex texts to women and had had an affair.
While Mee puts Cherie Blair in a very visible position on the High Street, another of her big ventures, Omnia Strategy, stays firmly out of sight in its stated business of providing ‘strategic counsel to governments, corporate and private clients’.
Founded by her in 2011, it is an international law firm which makes its money from her claim to have deep intelligence know-how for her clients to draw on. Through it, she has advised governments, including Albania and Bahrain, a pressure group in Nigeria and a company in Egypt.
What it does is not unlike groups such as Control Risks and Kroll, which help companies manage political and security risks, but with a legal rather than a security emphasis.
Omnia claims to: ‘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.’
It is also known to use former intelligence officers and investigative companies.
Some of Omnia’s work may dovetail with the activities of Tony Blair Associates, her husband’s holding company, but the principals on both sides are careful to discount such suggestions.Yet office location provides some support for such a proposition.
Omnia occupies anonymous offices in Great Cumberland Place, in Central London, alongside the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. Her Foundation For Women is based there, too. This is a fortress-like building, overlooking Hyde Park, where security is tight.
No one enters without codes and pre-arranged meetings. The Omnia website, like Tony Blair’s various organisations, provides no postal address or phone number.
But it is some of the work Omnia takes on that raises eyebrows. Among its clients is the government of Bahrain, a country which according to a Human Rights Watch report earlier this year has increased restrictions on human rights such as freedom of speech, assembly, and association.
Obstacle: The couple have grown apart since revelations about Tony and Rupert Murdoch’s wife
‘Security forces arbitrarily arrested scores of people and there were credible reports of torture and ill-treatment in detention,’ the report said.
It seems sad that such a distinguished, able and passionate human rights lawyer as Cherie should end up in the pay of the likes of Bahrain, which during the Arab Spring relied on imported Saudi troops to keep democracy at bay.
These businesses she is now immersed in 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 a Prime Minister’s wife. A seriously clever and independent woman, she has chosen to do her own thing.
And Omnia is nothing at all like Tony Blair Associates. Although it clearly benefits from the contacts she made as his wife, it is the sort of work she might well have done if she had not been married to him.
The second conclusion 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 this dedicated supporter of human rights helping the dictators who run Bahrain to stay in power?
Sadly the answer may be the same one that for the past seven years appears to have motivated her globe-trotting husband — greed.
Extracted from Blair Inc: The Man Behind The Mask by Francis Beckett, David Hencke and Nick Kochan, published by John Blake Publishing on March 19 at £20. To order a copy, call 0808 272 0808 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk (P&P free for a limited time).
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2985566/Will-Tony-Cherie-divorced-lead-separate-lives-amid-claims-resents-treatment-No10-closeness-Murdoch-s-ex-wife-friends-asking-explosive-question.html#ixzz3TsCTGgxC
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