‘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 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 will 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:

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 has 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,

It is not clear how BLJ came to this remarkable conclusion. Sometimes a PR company will tell its clients whatever it thinks they wish to hear, but we have no evidence that this was what happened in this case. BLJ had had a lot to do with Syria. The American Foreign Agents Registration Act requires lobbying companies to register the names of foreign principals, and BLJ has registered just one: a Mr Fares Kallas, whose address is given as Office of the First Lady of the Syrian Arab Republic in Damascus. In 2010 it signed a contract with the Syrian government to handle an interview with the First Lady in the American Vogue magazine. It charged $5,000 a month plus expenses, and it was worth every dime, judging by the results. The Vogue piece, of March 2011, all copies of which seem to have been removed from the Internet, began,

Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic – the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment …

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s website says, ‘the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.’ It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote. In Syria, power is hereditary. The country’s alliances are murky. How close are they to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah? There are souvenir Hezbollah ashtrays in the souk, and you can spot the Hamas leadership racing through the bar of the Four Seasons …

Tony Blair yearns for a role in the Syrian business, and attacked his successor as Labour leader, Ed Miliband, for preventing British intervention. It’s an odd irony that, if Miliband had followed Blair’s advice, Britain would have been bombing Assad’s bases, presumably at the same time as it was bombing Assad’s enemies, the Islamic State.

Some small consolation came in December 2013 when Pope Francis invited him to come to the Vatican and discuss what might be done about the conflict. It wasn’t much. A one-day meeting in January 2014 alongside former Egyptian Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei, US economist Jeffrey Sachs, US religious expert Thomas Walsh, former Russian diplomat Pyotr Stegny, Lebanese Middle East expert Joseph Maila, Spanish diplomat Miguel Angel Moratinos and French economist Thierry de Montbrial. Hardly a stellar line-up. The idea was to discuss ways of promoting a ceasefire in Syria, protecting the Christians there and ‘furthering a transitional and unified government’.

John Watts, according to his LinkedIn entry, is now managing director of BLJ Worldwide. He lists his former employers as 10 Downing Street and the Labour Party, and his base as Qatar; his picture shows him on a football field, presumably to emphasise his success in bringing the World Cup to Qatar.

This last was a considerable lobbying achievement. You might have thought someone would have pointed out at the time that the temperature in Qatar when the World Cup is played is likely to be so hot as to pose a real risk to players, and even more to spectators. You might have thought FIFA would take notice of the fact that Qatar was the only one of nine bidders for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments where there was a high risk of a terrorist attack on the competition, according to a report FIFA itself commissioned.7 It might have concerned it that, as Frances O’Grady of the TUC had pointed out, foreign construction workers on the World Cup site would face working conditions that would make them little more than slaves. It takes lobbying skill of a high order to overcome such weighty objections.

The new FA chairman, Greg Dyke, is trying to unscramble the mess, calling for the competition to be moved either to a time when Qatar’s temperature will be tolerable or to somewhere else. As we write, the betting is that it will be moved to January, which will keep faith with Qatar, but will severely disrupt British and European domestic football.

‘I don’t know how many people have been to Qatar in June. I have,’ Dyke told Sky News. ‘The one thing I can tell you is you can’t play a football tournament in Qatar in June.’ How was FIFA persuaded to make this extraordinary decision?

BLJ Worldwide’s website disappeared shortly after we began the research for this book, but has now been reinstated. Its Qatar clients include the Qatar 2022 World Cup bid and, on its home page, it hails the achievement thus:

CHANGING A COUNTRY’S DESTINY. BLJ Worldwide led the landmark international communications campaign that helped Qatar win the right to stage the 2022 FIFA World Cup, transforming the future of a country and a region.

How did it do it?

BLJ utilized an array of strategic communications – including public diplomacy, by introducing one country to another in innovative ways – while working on the campaign. We developed messaging that focused on the benefits of hosting the World Cup in the Middle East, and specifically in Qatar. We worked with key journalists in the sports and news sectors in key countries, securing high-profile interviews and story placements in broadcast and trade media.

The present authors are not quite sure how you go about ‘introducing one country to another in innovative ways’.

ENTER THE HOTSHOT BANKER

Another key player in Blair’s relationship with Qatar is Michael Klein (whom we shall meet again when we discuss Guinea in Chapter 11). Blair’s business relationship with Klein goes back to the long-drawn-out merger between Glencore – the world’s biggest commodities trading company set up by Marc Rich – and Xstrata, a mining company.

Marc Rich was an American commodities trader, hedge fund manager, financier and businessman, indicted for tax evasion and trading with Iran and controversially pardoned as President Clinton’s last act in office. Former President Jimmy Carter said, ‘I don’t think there is any doubt that some of the factors in his pardon were attributable to his large gifts. In my opinion, that was disgraceful.’8

The merger gathered speed in early 2012, but there were frequent stumbling blocks. One was the position of Qatar Holdings, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which wanted to improve the terms. Qatar Holdings had between 11 per cent and 12 per cent of Xstrata and was the largest shareholder in Xstrata after Glencore, which had acquired more than a third of the company. Qatar Holdings eventually agreed to the price.

In September 2012, it was revealed that Blair had helped broker the deal with Qatar Holdings, leading to its acceptance of the offer. The Daily Telegraph reported that Blair was advising Glencore, although it also noted that Blair had advised Qatar in the past.9 The Financial Times noted that Blair had brought together Glencore’s chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg, and Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani.10 Al Thani oversees Qatar Holdings and the oil-and-gas-rich Gulf state’s other sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority. According to someone who was then a business associate of Blair’s, Michael Klein worked on this with Hamad bin Jassim, and brought Blair into it because Blair had a close relationship with Hamad bin Jassim.

At the foot of a press release (containing the names of bankers and banks involved in the deal) issued on 7 February 2012, was written ‘M. Klein and company, LLC and its affiliates Michael Klein Strategic consultant to each of Xstrata and Glencore.’ Klein’s role was regarded as unusual, as advisers are typically hired by one side of a deal only.

Blair’s links with Klein have expanded the former prime minister’s banking network at the highest levels. Klein was a Citibanker – one of a group of financiers famous for their international connections – and he had made it to the head of Citi’s global corporate investment bank in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It was reported in the Wall Street Journal that Klein had ‘built up a reputation as especially close to Middle Eastern billionaires such as Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed , a major investor in Citigroup’. The paper also reported that he had arranged Abu Dhabi’s $7.5 billion capital infusion into Citi.11

Klein, who had been tipped as a possible head of the bank, left Citibank in July 2008, shortly after Vikram Pandit took over its management. Klein quickly found a niche as an independent adviser to big companies, advising Bob Diamond, the head of Barclays, on buying the core assets of Lehman Brothers, after its demise. He also advised Dubai, which was struggling with the debt accumulated by Dubai World. Moreover, it is understood that Klein proffered his banking and financial engineering services to the British government when it was thrashing around and struggling to contain the banking crisis of 2008.

We learn from Euromoney that Michael Klein has a ‘banking boutique’. Blair is clearly someone he can call on when he needs a door opened or some sweet-talking for a client. The magazine wrote,

The kiosk is basically a bit of a status symbol. No effort is made to dress the organization up as a corporate entity, espousing team effort and client-focused mission statements. The kiosk is all about the principal and it’s obvious that the principal has amazingly strong client relationships because otherwise he wouldn’t be appearing on the top line of the deal. In a way, kiosks are doing for star investment bankers what hedge funds did for star traders.12

Whether he is a client of Blair or Blair one of his clients may be a moot point.

The MailOnline website reported on 15 September 2012, ‘Klein and Blair know each other through their mutual connections to Abu Dhabi, where Blair is on the payroll of Mubadala, the sovereign wealth fund that invests Abu Dhabi’s vast oil profits.’13

Michael Klein’s connections with Blair led to speculation that the two men might merge their interests, although this has been denied by Blair’s office. As a master of networking, Blair can draw on Klein’s contacts in Middle Eastern financial institutions. That facility chimes well with Blair’s political connections. While the partnership may stay sub rosa, it also remains powerful.

THE IRISH DIMENSION

Blair’s links with Qatar came to light in 2010, when he put the Qatari Prime Minister in touch with the Irish businessman Patrick McKillen. McKillen was seeking £70 million to buy the Maybourne hotel group from the Barclay brothers. The Guardian noted, ‘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.’

The Guardian reported that the High Court in London heard that the colourful Belfast-born businessman met Sheikh Hamed’s son Sheikh Jassim in the lobby of Claridge’s to discuss a possible investment. McKillen said, ‘During the meeting Sheik Jassim said that Tony Blair and his father [Sheikh Hamed] had been doing business in Doha and the issue of Maybourne came up. Tony Blair had suggested that they should make contact with Paddy McKillen.’14

He denied the Qatari deal was done by Blair acting as his agent. He said, ‘No, it came purely from a discussion in Doha between an ex-head of state and head of state. I’m not sure what business they were doing but the two gentlemen are very close.’ As we have seen, Blair’s tentacles continue to spread globally, and not least across to the Atlantic, where he has a legacy of support and contacts.

Notes

1 The Guardian, 2 February 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011
/feb/02/ccc-construction-high-court-contempt

2 www.uk.practicallaw.com, 26 May 2011: http://uk.practicallaw.com/5-506-1731?sd=plc

3 Independent, 24 March 2010: http://www.independent.co.uk/
news/uk/politics/so-is-there-any-truth-in-stephen-
byers-claims-that-he-was-able-to-alter-policy-1926156.html

4 The Guardian, 2 February 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/
feb/02/ccc-construction-high-court-contempt

5 Union News, 28 August 2014: http://union-news.co.uk/2014/08/forced-
labour-university-college-london-campus/

6 http://wikileaks.org/syria-files/docs/2089956_
political-communications.html

7 Sunday Times, 15 June 2014

8 Los Angeles Times, 21 February 2001: http://articles.latimes.com/2001/feb/21/news/mn-28265

9 Daily Telegraph, 8 September 2012: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
finance/newsbysector/industry/mining/9527478/
Glencore-and-Xstrata-merger-descends-into-acrimony.html

10 Financial Times, 4 July 2013: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/dc99ef1e-
de45-11e2-9b47-00144feab7de.html#slide0

11 Wall Street Journal, 7 February 2012: http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/
02/07/one-banker-stood-on-both-sides-of-glencore-xstrata/

12 Euromoney, September 2013 http://www.euromoney.com/Article/
3256868/Abigail-with-attitude-Phone-chargerVerizon-flexes-its.html

13 Mailonline, 15 September 2012: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/
article-2203546/Tony-Blair--1m-hour-mediator-lives-
opulent-country-estate.html

14 The Guardian, 11 May 2012: http://www.theguardian.com/business/
2012/may/11/court-tony-blair-hotels-bid