Blair - Mohammed Bin Salman Affairs, and How Blair's Connection in several Mega Cities

Aug 12, 2023

London 7.07pm (Aug 12) / Indonesia New Capital City Nusantara 2.07am (Aug 13) / Astana Kazakhstan 0.07am (Aug 13) / Riyadh 9.07pm (Aug 12)

Sir Tony Blair’s institute continued to advise the government of Saudi Arabia after the murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and still receives money from the Gulf kingdom. In a Financial Times report on the Tony Blair Institute’s first annual accounts, it confirmed the receipt of millions from Media Investment Limited (MIL), which is a subsidiary of Saudi Research & Marketing Group, registered in Guernsey. Its former chair was Saudi Culture Minister Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed al-Farhan. April 18, 2015, Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz, the father of Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), received Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair KG (Knight of the Order of the Garter) on what is said to be one of his last engagements as envoy for the Middle East.

Blair’s institute “was set up in late 2016 after Blair announced that he was wrapping up his controversial business empire in order to focus on philanthropy,” reported the FT.

Blair is a very rich man and declares that he does not take any of the money as income for himself. Nevertheless he can hardly be treated seriously as a commentator on British politics when his entire post-politics career has been built on forging business links with Gulf and other oil-gas interests.

Blair chairs the US financial group JP Morgan’s international council and is on the advisory panel to the Southern Gas Corridor pipeline.

The latter is a $40 billion project to bring gas from the Caspian Sea to western Europe via Georgia, Turkey and Albania and, not coincidentally, is probably the most significant threat to Russia’s dominance of Europe’s gas market.

His meeting last week with Italy’s far-right Home Minister Matteo Salvini was mainly to discuss the Adriatic end of the gas pipeline, which is supposed to reach Italy if it can overcome opposition to its environmental impact.

Blair’s other big funder is Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk who is close to the pro-Nato government of fellow billionaire Petro Poroshenko. Pinchuk has been funding Blair’s Faith Foundation since 2011.

Blair seems to have a finger in every pie related to Western energy interests in the Middle East and the former Soviet sphere. He is like a British Henry Kissinger, if not as intellectually respected.

Since he first became party leader, Blair always linked himself to the most neoconservative leaders and power brokers in the Western elite, from Margaret Thatcher to Rupert Murdoch and George W Bush.

Following his disastrous role in the Iraq war, he has become a bagman for the oil-gas sector across the wider Middle East, with powerful friends from Dubai to Astana.

Blair has consistently been hawkishly pro-war since he left office, backing military action across the Middle East and favouring a hard line against Iran. He is close to the far-right Israeli government as well as to the rulers of the United Arab Emirates.

However, Today’s presenter Nick Robinson preferred to describe him as Labour’s most successful politician and left it to left-wing commentator Owen Jones to point out his links with “murderous dictatorships.”

The former prime minister’s organisation has been helping to craft Vision 2030, the modernisation programme spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the past six years.

It means the new lavish city of Saudi, NEOM. So, currently Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair KG (Knight of the Order of the Garter) managing and or advising 2 new gigantic cities: NEOM, and the new capital city of Indonesia named NUSANTARA. Or actually 3 cities because indirectly Blair works for the Kazakhstan regime, and (indirectly) wants to highlight the new capital city of Kazakhstan, Astana.

October 2022, Blair gives his support to Indonesia's new capital project known as Nusantara in Kalimantan Island (Borneo). Blair's party said the capital relocation was a big mission.

Tony Blair also discussed this project when he met the Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan. Tony Blair Institute (TBI) also affirmed support for Indonesia.

"Indonesia is undertaking a great mission to relocate its capital city into the heart of the country in Borneo and TBI has been proudly supporting this agenda," said Tony Blair Institute through its official Twitter, or now is X apps (20/10/2022).

TBI also mentioned that Tony Blair met Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan to discuss the progress of relocating the capital.

Furthermore, the Tony Blair Institute gave support to Indonesia which held the G20 presidency in 2022. Indonesia is considered a country that has the potential to be an "economic powerhouse".

Tony Blair also agreed with the minister of State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) Erick Thohir to discuss SOEs. Another topic that Tony Blair highlighted was Indonesia's role in global health architecture.

Tony Blair Institute said he supported the Ministry of Health on, "health transformation strategies including conducting clinical testing for new vaccines to cure life-threatening diseases," Tony Blair Institute said.

Back about MbS - Blair. Actually, in September 2018, Tony Blair received donations of up to $12 million from the Saudi Kingdom; his institute then wrote articles praising Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman while Blair himself urged a British military intervention in Syria

The multimillion-pound partnership began in late 2017, when, in a previously undisclosed agreement, Blair’s Institute for Global Change seconded staff to work at the Saudi ministry of information and culture. As part of a year-long contract, his consultants advised Saudi officials on “the policy and objectives of the reform programme”, according to his spokesman.

US intelligence agencies said that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi

In October 2018, during the deal’s final months, the prince sparked international condemnation after ordering the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi.

Britain needs Saudi oil profits invested into London (and elsewhere) to help offset its balance of payments. Blair is a reprehensible person but is very much in line with British geopolitical orthodoxy. Backing MBS helps to ensure British interests served democratisation are denied. In the wake of the killing, Blair considered whether to suspend ties with MBS and the kingdom at large. A number of senior staff suggested there were reputational and ethical grounds to do so. However, Blair feared he would lose influence over MBS. According to a rare statement from his spokesman, he took the “view then and remains strongly of the view now that staying engaged there is justified” despite the "terrible crime" in question.

After Khashoggi’s death, neither Blair nor his institute confirmed if it had suspended ties with Riyadh. In response to criticism that he was “complicit” in the killing in November 2018, his spokesman said: “We have nothing further to add to what Mr Blair has said previously”

Today, Blair has issued his first public statement confirming his ongoing work in the country after inquiries from the Sunday Times. His spokesman stated: “The Tony Blair Institute project in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was and is about the modernisation drive in the country.”

For at least since 2010s, felt that “behind 3-4 steps” by Qatari about influence in UK especially in London, Saudi push more aggressive to toppled Qatari to be “most for buy everything” in UK.

Wealthy investors have increasingly been eyeing opportunities to get involved with clubs at the top tier of English football for the past few years, leading to some high-profile — and in some cases highly controversial — takeovers.

Never was that more apparent than when, in 2021, the takeover of Newcastle United by the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund (PIF) was completed. The Saudis feel motivated again to (more) buying everything in the UK, especially in London. Especially because for a long time, at least in the last 2 decades, Qatar buys “a lot of” things in London.

The US state department agreed to sell the building of (former) US Embassy in Grosvenor Square to Qatari Diar in 2009 to fund a new embassy in the Nine Elms regeneration project south of the Thames. Estimates put the Grosvenor Square site’s value at £500m before it was made a listed building, which would have reduced the value because of restrictions on development. Grosvenor Square has housed the US embassy since 1938.

Prince Andrew, (former Mayor of London) Boris Johnson and the prime minister of Qatar gazed through rain-spattered glass on to the streets of London far below as they celebrated the opening of Britain’s tallest building, the Shard, July 5th, 2012, 22 days before opening Summer Olympic Games 2012.

For Johnson, (former) mayor of London, the unseasonably cold July day in 2012 symbolised London’s resurgence after the devastation of the global financial crisis.

Prince Andrew marked the occasion by abseiling down a section of the 310-metre tower for charity, saying afterwards that he had easily overcome the “psychobabble” about fear of heights.

But the day was perhaps most auspicious for Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, known colloquially as HBJ. The great steel-and-glass edifice that now loomed over Britain’s capital had been built with nearly £2bn of Qatari investment.

The building served as a totem for a strategy that he pioneered: Qatar – a British protectorate from 1916 to 1971 – was deploying its vast oil-and-gas wealth to buy huge chunks of the nation that once ruled over it.

Qatar and the vast al-Thani clan that rules it have played a real-life game of Monopoly, scooping up trophy assets such as hotels on Mayfair and Park Lane – not to mention properties on Pall Mall, Oxford Street, Bond Street and Vine Street. Prize purchases include ultra-high-end hotels such as the Ritz and Claridge’s, the international finance hub at Canary Wharf, not to mention luxury personal retreats, including rural idylls and London mansions.

The state of Qatar alone, not counting individual royals’ personal holdings, is the 10th largest landowner in the UK, according to analysts at MSCI Real Assets. The emirate owns nearly 2.1m sq metres (23m sq feet) of property in Britain, more than 1.5 times the area of London’s Hyde Park.

Many of the properties are owned through Jersey, the British Virgin Islands or the Cayman Islands, meaning ownership is often difficult to determine via public disclosures.

It's hard to walk round London and admire the sights without admiring something paid for by Qatar.

From some of the most famous hotels and landmarks to the cranes arcing over the South Bank, Qatar has a substantial finger in a huge number of pies.

The UK is Qatar's single largest investment destination, with £35bn in place and another £5bn on its way in the next five years.

But the Qatari never tried to attempt and or engage with Blair. Saudi Arabia does.

For Kazakhstan. Blair is one of several well-paid western advisers who have burnished the image of Kazakhstan’s former ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev and his autocratic regime. Narzabayev invited Blair to give him strategic advice after Kazakh security forces shot dead 14 people during the country’s December 2011 anti-government uprising. The protesters in the western oil town of Zhanaozen were demanding higher wages.

Blair offered advice on a speech Nazarbayev made in Cambridge, where the Kazakh leader was to make his case to a western audience of academics and dignitaries.

In a letter to Narzabayev, Blair advised the president to “meet head-on the Zhanaozen issue” while stressing the “enormous progress” Kazakhstan had made since its independence from the Soviet Union.

Blair urged the dictator to stress he “understood” what his critics were saying. The former Labour prime minister suggested Nazarbayev say reforms would “take time” and should be done “with care and with stability uppermost”.

The Kazakh government is said to have paid Blair’s consultancy $13m for its services.

Narzabayev incorporated the ideas in the speech. Blair signed off by writing: “With very best wishes. I look forward to seeing you in London! Yours ever, Tony Blair.”

The Kazakh regime has spent – sometimes covertly – large sums in recent years to improve its standing in the west and to rebut persistent allegations of corruption and lavish spending by Narzabayev and his family.

His daughter and grandson own £80m of property in London. In 2020 the National Crime Agency lost an attempt in the high court to force them to explain where the money came from.

Blair’s former consultancy firm, Tony Blair Associates, signed a deal to advise Kazakhstan’s government in 2011, months after Nazarbeyev was controversially re-elected with 96% of the vote and weeks before the massacre.

The former Conservative cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken wrote two flattering books about Nazarbayev. Aitken travelled around the country on a plane belonging to Sir Richard Evans, the former head of BAE Systems who sits on the board of Samruk, a Kazakh state holding company.

The Guardian described Aitken’s 2009 Narzarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan as “quite probably the hagiography of the year”. He denied receiving money from the regime for the work, which skirted over repression and Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record. But the Pandora Papers, a trove of leaked data exposing tax haven secrecy reported on by the Guardian and others, suggested Aitken was paid £166,000.

According to the papers, World PR, a firm that represents several Kazakh ministries, sent the cash to the former MP’s Oxford bank account via the British Virgin Islands. It allegedly also paid for his hotel and book tour in the US.

Meanwhile, London-based bankers have earned large fees from assisting with the flotation on the London Stock Exchange of Kazakh mining conglomerates. They include the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) and Kazakhmys, which mines the country’s copper.

The late businessman and Tory party chairman Sir Paul Judge was an ENRC director. The company also hired and subsequently ousted Sir Richard Sykes, the former head of GlaxoSmithKline and chancellor of Brunel University.

A spokesperson for Blair said he was not an adviser to Narzarbayev but did “give thoughts” on the president’s speech and said he should deal with human rights issues during his UK trip. The Kazakhstan project was in line with international community goals and was “focused on the government’s change and reform programme,” they added.

The project fee did not go to Blair personally and mostly funded an in-country team, they said, with the “business side” of his consultancy work ending in 2016.

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