THE BLAIR RICH PROJECT

‘Blair is very interested in money and it takes precedence over other things. There is no evidence that he has done anything positive, other than make money. My advice to him was that he can make a lot of money as long as it’s a by-product of what you’re doing.’

– AMERICAN BUSINESSMAN AND FORMER FRIEND OF TONY BLAIR, SPEAKING TO AUTHORS.

After Tony Blair’s last Prime Minister’s Questions on 27 June 2007, he headed back to his constituency with Cherie and the children. Outside Darlington Station there was a sharp reminder of his swiftly changed status. The family headed straight towards a smart BMW – and, just in time, someone arrived to whisper to the former PM that that was not his car. Would he kindly head towards the Vauxhall in the far corner?

Perhaps it was at that moment that Blair decided he would never be humiliated like that again; that the car waiting for him would always be the best in the place; that he would recreate the life he had lived as Prime Minister. More likely, the decision had been made many years earlier.

Months earlier he had been advised by a leading American businessman that, when he gave up the premiership, he should focus on rehabilitating his reputation, on doing good works, and business should be secondary. The businessman said that Blair should do a few things that are important. If there was money to be made as a by-product of doing something good for the world, fine. The model, he said, should be Paul Volcker, who made a fair amount of money, but as a consequence of doing something good and not as a principle focus.

Blair had asked to meet this businessman, who is, like himself, an active Christian, through an intermediary. The businessman, who has since broken off his relationship with Blair, now says that the former Prime Minister did not take any of his advice. He told us that Blair privately thought it was absurd advice. He says Blair is ‘very interested in money and it takes precedence over other things. It is also clear he has done a horrible job in all the assignments he has taken. There is no evidence that he has done anything positive, other than make money.

‘My advice to him was that he can make a lot of money as long as it’s a by-product of what you’re doing. James Wolfensohn built greenhouses using his own money. He was a wonderful man. There is nothing wrong with a politician making money, but you have to be prepared to sacrifice some money to do the higher thing.’

Blair’s interests have centred on the Tony Blair financial empire, the most impenetrable financial body that is legally possible in the United Kingdom. The structure of his companies makes it impossible to know who is paying him, or where the money goes, and ensures that no one can find out what he is worth.

Extremely clever tax accountants and lawyers have devised a scheme that breaks no rules but means that Tony Blair can deny any public claim disclosing his income because no one can prove it. When journalists and others make estimates, Blair representatives invariably say the estimates are wrong, but provide no information.

Except once. Blair was asked about his net worth during the razzmatazz on 21 July 2014, occasioned by the twentieth anniversary of his taking the leadership of the Labour Party. Asked if he was worth £100 million, he replied that he was worth just a fifth of that. £20 million? Our estimate is quite a lot more – we’ll come to that – but he has set up a system that makes it virtually impossible to work out his wealth; even he might have difficulty calculating it.

ORIGINS OF A FINANCIAL EMPIRE

Blair’s financial empire dates from 2009, when Tony Blair Associates (TBA) was established. Curiously, it just postdates a remarkable turnaround in the Blairs’ property fortunes (for more on Blair’s property interests, see Chapter 14, ‘The Property Portfolio’). He moved from being overburdened with mortgage debt on his grand house in Connaught Square to being able to splash out on new properties for himself and his wife in the country in 2008, and then to finance homes for his own children. The only explanation for this remarkable reversal in fortunes is that he must have big new sources of income from new clients and access to much more credit to bankroll this.

TBA’s website has changed since it was originally set up, but in early 2015 it read,

Tony Blair Associates is the umbrella organisation for our commercial operations.

We work with governments on the path of reform providing advice and support on key areas of governance, modernisation and implementation.

We provide geopolitical and strategic advice to multinational corporations.

We bring together institutional investors with potential investment opportunities.

Tony Blair’s commercial activities provide important funding for his philanthropic work.

Tony Blair Associates is entirely separate from the Foundations which are independent charitable entities accountable to their own boards and trustees and subject to applicable charity regulations.1

When he started out, it was said in the Sunday Times that the company would ‘allow him to provide, in partnership with others, strategic advice on a commercial and pro bono [free, as a public service] basis, on political and economic trends and governmental reform’.2 Since then we have heard little about TBA doing pro bono work, and the home page now says, ‘Tony Blair’s commercial activities provide important funding for his philanthropic work.’ But how much of the profit from TBA goes into the Blair charities is a closely guarded secret.

What exactly does it do? Ken Silverstein, in his book The Secret World of Oil, points out that there are several governments and companies all over the world who need better relationships with the USA, and hire lobbying and PR firms to manage their relationship with the American public and policymakers.

But, says Silverstein,

[L]obbying is subject to disclosure laws, and hence in recent years foreign governments and interests seeking influence in Washington have increasingly turned to other means, which are largely unregulated and don’t always require public disclosure. These include: making contributions to think tanks, universities, and non profit groups; setting up business associations that advocate for better political ties with the US but aren’t legally defined as lobbying organizations; and offering huge consulting contracts and speaking fees to politically prominent Westerners. These financial flows have helped recruit many prominent Western cheerleaders, including retired politicians (and their offspring), corporate titans, college professors, think-tank fellows, and countless former senior government officials …3

Blair ticks all the boxes. He is as prominent a former statesman as you’re likely to be able to hire. He has philanthropic bodies such as the Tony Blair Faith Foundation to which his clients can contribute. And, most important of all, he has the best possible contacts in the USA.

From former employees, we understand that originally there were to be two businesses – one offering advice to governments, the other offering advice to companies. However, the companies that make up TBA are structured to be impenetrable and Blair was persuaded by the business experts he hired to simplify the structure and put them under one body, TBA. Even then, his own internal business experts thought what he ended up with was too complicated, with its two similar private companies, Windrush and Firerush, which were originally intended to cater for the two different sorts of client – governments and companies.

‘Tony’s organisation has been in my personal and very confidential view a bit too complex in terms of the entities,’ says one of them. ‘The trading names of the company sound very much like off-the-shelf companies, which they are. There is a structure that looks unnecessarily complex and those names do not mean much in terms of trading. You know, the president of Kazakhstan doesn’t say, “Gosh I want to be advised on governance by Windrush or Firerush.” He says, “I want to be advised by Tony Blair.”’

TBA has similarities in its work with Kissinger Associates, which was set up in 1982 by Henry Kissinger, the former American secretary of state and national security adviser and both generates cash through consultancies and does some philanthropic work.

TBA has almost no public profile and its finances are shrouded in secrecy too. There exists a complex web of structures involving twelve different legal entities.4

They almost certainly handle some of the large amounts originally coming in from Blair’s six-figure speaking fees – according to one charity, the minimum fee is £500,000 – and from his banking and insurance consultancies, and his pay from Middle Eastern regimes. This would not include his memoirs though, as he gave away the advance to the Royal British Legion.

OPAQUE CORPORATE STRUCTURES

Blair has set up a complex, opaque corporate structure that makes it impossible to know how much money he is making. ‘He’s willing to spend good money to keep it hidden,’ said Richard Murphy, an accountant and founder of the London-based Tax Justice Network. Blair has thus far declined to accept a peerage, which he is entitled to, and which Murphy suspects is due to the fact that he would have to disclose his income to the House of Lords if he did so.5

Murphy is an expert in this area. He explained how Blair set up such a structure to handle his money. He points out that Blair has used a very arcane structure based not on the more common limited-liability partnership – as used by Peter (Lord) Mandelson (a minister in the Blair government and a former European Commissioner for Trade) to set up his company – but on the little-known partnership regulations set up in 1907 by the Campbell Bannerman Liberal government.

As we have seen, Blair has two sets of companies: the Windrush companies and the Firerush companies. As they are partnerships under the 1907 Act, they are not taxed themselves like a limited-liability partnership or a limited company, but, instead, the owners of all their investments are taxed individually. The great thing is that the owners don’t have to be declared. It all goes back to Bircham and Company Nominees Ltd – organised through a leading private-wealth specialist lawyer, Bircham Dyson Bell – or BDB, as it now calls itself. The structure is said to have been set up by Alex Harle, Blair’s lawyer. The nominee company is called BDBCO No. 819 Ltd.

Set up as a nominee company to act as a trustee or an executor of a will, this entity does not reveal its ownership on records at Companies House. Instead, its shares are listed as held by a second off-the-shelf entity, BDBCO No 822. This company in turn conceals its true ownership. Its shares are listed as held by the lawyers, acting as nominees. Even the details of the accounts are private.

There is also one important difference between the two sets of companies – Windrush and Firerush – set up for Blair to receive his income. Firerush, unlike Windrush, is registered with what was then the Financial Services Authority, now the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Firerush offers investment advice in a number of low-tax and lowly regulated jurisdictions, including Gibraltar, Lithuania and Romania. This allows two things: people can invest in Blair’s Firerush companies without its being declared who they are; and the Firerush companies, unlike the Windrush companies, can start trading and investing on the world’s stock markets.

And the latter is certainly what has happened, as the Sunday Telegraph revealed in January 2013.6

The newspaper reported that:

a trading desk was now operating at Blair’s London headquarters;
five employees at one of his companies, Firerush Ventures, had obtained licences from the Financial Services Authority;
the team was led by David Lyon, formerly managing director at Barclays Capital;
the FCA (formerly FSA) licences gave Blair’s staff the power to advise clients and invest money on their behalf.

So why on earth would Blair want to be registered with the FCA? One of his former financial specialists told us, ‘They don’t trade. They are registered with the Financial Services Authority, just in case. What Tony didn’t want to do was inadvertently do something unauthorised, so they had a counsel’s opinions to what would be the safest way to make sure they never did anything that would look like they have crossed the line.

‘There is a category called arranging deals and investments, or something like that. Now, Tony said, if I had to give financial advice I’d start making people very poor. He absolutely did not give financial advice; he doesn’t really do anything that you could call financial services at all; he wouldn’t want to.’

So why the FCA authorisation? There is a clue in the fact that Blair is close to sovereign wealth funds – the biggest intact pools of capital in the world. ‘Tony happens to know the rulers of the countries who have the biggest funds,’ we were told, ‘whether it’s Malaysia, Brunei or whatever. Let’s say a company comes to him and says, I’m setting up a new venture and we need funding for this, whatever it is, and Tony introduces them to some sheikh, let’s say over lunch.

‘That’s absolutely fine. Tony is not giving financial advice; he’s not saying to the person providing the money, I have evaluated this opportunity and the return structure is excellent or whatever, this is a good investment for you. He’s absolutely not doing that; he’s never wanted to. However, just possibly, he could be interpreted to be in this category of arranging deals and investments, simply by making an introduction, even if he had no role in the financial advice.

‘So, just to be absolutely on the safe side, you haven’t strayed into financial services without meaning to, and therefore performed financial services without being under the requirement of regulation.’

It is complex and costly to become FCA-authorised, and you need to employ clerical and legal people, just to keep your authorisation up to date. It is a lot of trouble to go to on the off-chance. But we are assured: ‘Tony does not give financial advice. Tony’s best advice is, as you can imagine, about global political trends; it is about, for companies, how to deal with governments, and for governments, how to govern better.’7

A posting on LinkedIn discloses details of Blair’s operation. It was written by an IT consultant called Matt Walsh, who worked for Blair for just over a year until May 2011. Some of the clues to the Blair operation were given on the LinkedIn pages by Walsh and former Blair employee Scott Macpherson as part of their knowledge and experience to attract new clients.

Walsh discloses that he provided support for the IT operations for Blair’s possible trading system. He listed all the IT systems he oversaw during his time with Blair, including two types of trading system. This included systems used by Reuters and Bloomberg – used by expert City traders.

Macpherson discloses that he worked for Blair between 2009 and 2011 and was involved in setting up new offices for his Africa Governance Initiative.8 On his profile, Macpherson said his duties included ‘planning and implementation of satellite sites, primarily consulting on and implementing sites in Kuwait, Sierra Leone, Toronto, Liberia, Yale NY, Rwanda as well as other locations.’ Like Walsh, he said he provided ‘Bloomberg support for a small trading team.’

In September 2011 it was reported that high-profile banker Mark Labovitch had resigned as chief operating officer of Blair’s Firerush Ventures. His resignation came little more than a year after he was appointed – along with a former Lehman Brothers banker, Varun Chandra – and just days before the broadcast of the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary we speak about in Chapter 1, which revealed Blair’s incredibly lucrative business dealings across the Middle East.9

Labovitch had worked for the Irish newspaper magnate Tony O’Reilly, who at that time owned the Independent, and was an old friend and colleague of the Independent’s John Rentoul, the only journalist writing for national newspapers who remains slavishly uncritical of Blair. It was O’Reilly who introduced Labovitch to Blair, at one of several lunches Blair had in O’Reilly’s boardroom while he was Prime Minister. Blair wanted him to set up financial systems for dealing with clients who were companies, rather than governments. He wanted him to help build a commercial business. Blair was working for governments but he was seeking to approach companies.

Labovitch was there to provide a commercial office discipline, to make sure contracts were written properly. He never thought Blair needed help with setting himself up in businesses – someone would always want to pay for Blair’s help, his advice, his name. But he did want banking contacts and expertise, and part of Labovitch’s role was to show Blair the sorts of ways in which he might be useful to corporate clients.

Labovitch presented Blair with six options (not all of which are known), one of which was setting up an asset-management operation, because asset management was more rewarding than pure advice. One of Labovitch’s options was ruled out because it would compete with JP Morgan.

Blair also asked Labovitch to check out Oman, suggesting he visit Sir Erik Bennett, a former air force officer who was in charge of the Oman air force, to see if there was some business they could do there.

The departure of Labovitch, who has connections to some of the world’s richest investors, threatened to leave a hole in Blair’s business empire. There was a lot of damaging speculation about the reasons for Labovitch’s departure, but we understand it was simply that Labovitch is interested in dealing with commercial clients, and the business was veering towards government clients.

It did also raise questions about the ways in which the empire is run.

As we have seen, Blair’s initial income goes into a limited partnership (under 1907 partnership regulations) in both Windrush and Firerush, called Windrush and Firerush No. 3. This limited partnership is not required to publish accounts, so we cannot see where the money comes from or how much it is.

This money is then transferred to a limited-liability company, Windrush or Firerush No. 2, in a lump sum – but we don’t know whether any of the money from the No. 3 companies is channelled elsewhere. It is perfectly possible, though there is not the slightest evidence, that it could be transferred to offshore trusts.

The money is then passed from there to a No. 1 company or Windrush Ventures company, also a limited partnership under the 1907 regulations, which does not have to declare tax. But nobody knows how much of the original money that went into No. 3 company ends up in the ventures company or No. 1 company. The only information publicly available is in the abbreviated accounts of the limited-liability partnership – the No. 2 company.

In 2009 Richard Murphy did this analysis of the No. 2 company on his blog post,10 which provides the most comprehensive information we have, even though it is six years out of date:

Its members are Windrush Ventures Limited and Windrush Ventures No. 1 Limited (they certainly exercised their imaginations when naming this lot).

KPMG audited it, which leaves me overflowing with confidence.

It turned over £6.8 million and made a profit of £350,000 from December 2007 to April 2009. We know from the accounts of Windrush Ventures Limited that just £12,000 of this was due to Windrush Ventures Limited to April 2008 but in the period from, presumably, December 2007 to April 2008 (when the limited company accounts were made up) some £1,463,000 was paid to Windrush Ventures for management services to Windrush Ventures No. 2 LLP. That’s about £365,000 a month. If that continued to April 2009 another £4.4 million or so of the income of the LLP would have gone to the Limited company in this way. That’s most of its reported expenses. It would be interesting to know why tax relief might be granted on this sum, and what transfer pricing enquiry it might give rise to (and yes, transfer pricing rules do apply internally in the UK) but I leave that aside for now.

Tony Blair is the controlling party of the whole structure. This is despite the fact that the recorded owner of the one share in issue in both Windrush Ventures Limited and Windrush Ventures No. 1 Limited is a nominee company – Bircham and Co. Nominees Limited. We have to assume they act for Tony Blair.

Windrush Ventures No. 1 Limited simply seems to hold a 50% interest in Windrush Ventures No. 2 LLP – from which it received £12,000 profit in the period to 30 April 2008. It seems to have no other activity.

Windrush Ventures Limited does have a trade, and an odd balance sheet which seems inflated by both large long term debts and liabilities for the size of probable activity it is undertaking, but from which no firm conclusions can be drawn as abbreviated accounts have been filed.

Murphy’s conclusion was,

First, there is an obvious desire for secrecy in this structure and a willingness to pay for it. The use of nominees to own the companies at the bottom of the pile is a start. Add to that the fact it is hard to find Blair in the set-up even though he owns it. Is it tax efficient? Not particularly. True, the profits all end up in UK limited companies – and the number of them means that the use of the small companies rate might be restricted – increasing the tax bill in the year to 30 April 2009 in all likelihood.

He also thinks Blair has been able to do this because of a loophole in the regulations for limited partnerships when they were updated – ironically by the then Chancellor Gordon Brown under Labour in 2000. The regulations said: ‘The partnership regulations will apply to most limited partnerships that have limited companies as their general partners and are registered under the Limited Partnerships Act 1907, as these partnerships must have their principal place of business in Great Britain on registration.’

Murphy comments in his blog,

Note the key point in the last paragraph: if the general partner is a limited company then the limited partnership must file accounts. And that is also true if the general partner is an unlimited company or Scottish partnership with members who are limited companies. But someone, somewhere, clearly forgot to update the regulation for the creation of UK limited liability partnerships in 2000. And some lawyer somewhere has noticed this. The result is the whole structure that has been created for Tony Blair.

Blair himself was known by colleagues to be a pretty good employment and tax lawyer, but there is no evidence, and it is extremely unlikely, given Gordon Brown’s reputation for probity, that this loophole was created by Gordon Brown to help Blair in the future. The only official justification came from a written statement by Matthew Doyle, then political director of the Office of Tony Blair, to the Guardian: ‘Why we set it up … was in order to allow Mr Blair’s office sensibly to administer his different projects, in accordance with relevant regulations and company law in the UK. He has an operation that has over 80 people working for it around the world. This was done on the basis of advice.’ It employs considerably more now.

However, a similar conclusion to Richard Murphy’s has come from a tax lawyer who pointed out that this structure is used by private-equity companies. The same structure allows them to manage their investments from overseas in the UK without paying additional tax, and also means they do not have to pay corporation tax on all the companies, as do most UK-based corporations. They benefit from the lowering of capital-gains tax by successive governments. And, if they pay out dividends, they get taxed at a lower rate. This structure has become more common as private-equity and alternative financing structures have been developed in the UK.

Blair’s new secretive companies also follow the rapidly developing offshore world of capitalism, outlined by business journalist Nicholas Shaxson in his book Treasure Islands,11 where secretive firms based in high-tax countries, such as the UK, load huge administrative expenses to avoid tax without proper transparency, while often operating through trusts and tax havens and offshore banks.

Indeed our researches produced a rather interesting offshore riddle. Firerush and Windrush were set up in Gibraltar in 2010 on the same day. They were created by accountants Baker Tilly and run from a nameplate office in Gibraltar with the main shareholders being BT (Baker Tilly) Nominees and BT (Baker Tilly) Corporate Services Ltd.

Tony Blair’s office says this has nothing to do with him. It is a remarkable coincidence that someone has chosen to use the same names Blair has chosen for his companies in an offshore country.

Blair keeps control over the companies he does own in the hands of people he has trusted for years. One is Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff during the Iraq War, who was appointed senior adviser to TBA and also works for JP Morgan, which, as we have seen, pays Blair. He also, interestingly, took exams so that he has the necessary qualifications from the FCA to look over Blair’s interests in Firerush.

Official accounts show that a company set up by Blair to manage his business affairs paid just £315,000 in tax in 2011 on an income of more than £12 million. In that time, he employed 26 staff and paid them total wages of almost £2.3 million. The documents also reveal that, in the two years to 31 March 2013, Blair’s management company had a total turnover of nearly £15 million and paid tax of about £653,000.12

According to these accounts, in 2013 he was sitting on a cash pile of £13 million after paying out large sums to cover his overseas visits – often in a leased private jet and with very expensive hotel bills.

TBA clients are of course confidential. From public sources, these include:

Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, the iconic luxury handbag, luggage manufacturer, and cognac and champagne company, which employed Euan Blair at one stage;
Zurich Insurance, thought to bring in £0.5 million a year;
JP Morgan, thought to bring in £2 million a year – or $4 million according to the FT;
Emir of Kuwait, thought to have paid £27 million for consultancy advice;
Abu Dhabi government, thought to bring in £1 million a year;
Government of Kazakhstan, which, according to the Kazakh press, pays £8 million a year for economic and governance advice;
UI Energy, a Korean oil company, for which Blair admitted he had done some consultancy work but declined to publish the details, despite being pressed by the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (the watchdog body) to do so;13
International Sanitary Supply Association, for which Blair addressed a conference for a £50,000 fee;14
Wataniya, the Palestinian phone company owned by Qtel, itself a client of JP Morgan.

Blair has also made substantial sums of money from speeches in China and now advises the Mongolian government under a two-year consultancy agreement.15 He also got involved in the row over the Glencore and Xstrata merger. His recent role as peacemaker is said to have won him £620,000.16 At a meeting in Claridge’s in 2012, the Mail reported that he acted ‘as a mediator in negotiations between Glencore mining boss Ivan Glasenberg and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani.’ Finally, in 2012 Blair’s Government Advisory Practice (GAP) pulled in a contract with the state government of São Paulo in Brazil, worth almost £4 million a year.17

So how much money does Tony Blair make from all this? Some of the money (we do not know how much) is said to be routed towards his charitable activities. Cherie Blair also makes profit from her own business and law practice. And the charities, in particular the Blair Faith Foundation, also have their own secret donors, as we shall see. He also has to pay some 200 employees now, a figure he’s set his sights on growing to 500 over the coming years.

Depending on whom you believe, he is now worth around £60 million or possibly more.

Sources close to Blair have told us that the model for his growing organisation is the equally secretive US global management consultancy McKinsey. ‘There was a great New Labour love affair with McKinsey when Blair was Prime Minister,’ says one senior banking source close to Blair. ‘There are lot of McKinsey alumni on the government advisory side of Blair’s business, and always have been.’

The vast company, which advises world governments and business leaders, refuses to name the people it does business with, or discuss its multibillion-pound deals.

Staff lists of the ex-PM’s Africa Governance Initiative (AGI) – the charity he set up in 2008 – as well as Tony Blair Associates, the umbrella operation for his GAP, read like a Who’s Who of former McKinsey executives. They include German-born Dr Stephan Kriesel, the GAP head; Joe Capp, who runs Blair’s South American organisation; and Nnaemeka Okafor, who is the AGI’s head in Nigeria. Kriesel appears to enjoy his role. His Facebook page, which is open to public viewing, shows him in various locations, often wearing flamboyant clothing, including a bright white suit and gold turban, or else photographed on a camel wearing Arab dress.

Blair, who has links to McKinsey going back to his time in office, has also copied the US firm’s policy of hiring bright young graduates from Oxbridge, Harvard, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, instead of relying on experienced business managers.

McKinsey had a lot of input into the Blair business model, too, according to TBA insiders. Blair says that when you come to power for the first time, even though you’re called Prime Minister, you don’t have a lot of levers in your office, and you pull them only when things happen. He found this when he first came into office. So he created one in Downing Street, and now exports his model, according to one of the people who have helped him create the TBA business, ‘forming the policy unit, the delivery unit and the way you monitor what each department is doing so that it actually is responsive to the centre – this kind of structured methodology was created, I think there was lots of McKinsey input into that.’

Increasingly, Tony Blair Associates’ UK headquarters – in a Georgian townhouse in London’s Grosvenor Square, for which he pays £550,000 a year in rent – resembles the seat of power of a president or prime minister. The headquarters – the base for his three directors of Windrush Ventures – employs 35 people on an average salary of £86,000 a year, almost £1 million more than in 2012.

The company’s highest-paid director receives £273,000 – up from £200,000 the previous year, according to the accounts submitted to Companies House for 2012–13. This director is thought to be either Catherine Rimmer, Blair’s chief of staff and a former Downing Street aide, or David Lyon, a former Barclays investment banker who was recruited by Blair in 2012 to ‘grow and develop’ his business activities. The other two directors share £307,000 between them – nearly double the £175,000 paid in 2012.

The most accurate assessment of the wealth generation of Blair’s companies’ can be shown in this table.

Payment schedule
Windrush	30 April 2008 £000	30 April 2009 £000	31 March 2010 £000	30 April 2011 £000	31 March 2012 £000
A: Income of No. 2 LLP from No. 3 LP		6,436	5,152	9,837	10,588
B: Profit Share of No. 3 LP to No. 2 LLP		350	437	646	2,954
C: Remuneration from No. 2 LLP to Windrush Ventures Limited	1,463	6,436	5,152	9,837	10,588
Profit Share of No. 2 LLP
D: to Windrush Ventures Limited	12	163	218	426	1,177
E: to No. 1 Ltd	12	163	218	223	1,777
Firerush
A: Income of No. 2 LLP from No. 3 LP			438	802	1,603
B: Profit Share of No. 3 LP to No. 2 LLP			–	–	–
C: Remuneration from No. 2 LLP to Firerush Ventures Limited			438	802	1,603
D: Profit Share of No. 2 LLP			–	–	–
E: to Firerush Limited			–	–	–
F: to No. 1 Ltd			–	–	–

Altogether, this suggests that, up to 2012, Blair’s companies – not the Blairs themselves – generated some £40.7 million. If you add figures up to 2013, the money generated by Blair’s companies increased by another £13 million taking it to nearly £54 million.18 What is clear from these figures is that Blair’s financial empire is growing by the day, and the money he is making – whether for his charities or his family – continues to rise. He may not be in the league of Bill Clinton yet but he certainly aspires to be. Indeed, he is said to have told one of the people guarding him that he would love to be worth as much as the former American President.

His finances in the decade ahead could make him one of the most powerful global figures – advising companies and governments, from China to large swathes of Africa, Eastern and Central Europe and the Middle East. Whether he will be doing any good in the world, given the many brutal dictators whose image he is burnishing, is another matter.