Since standing down as prime minister in 2007, Blair and his companies have been awarded a string of multimillion consultancy contracts with private corporations, dictatorships and repressive regimes, including Kazakhstan, Kuwait, the UAE and Colombia. They include a contract worth more than £1m a year to advise the UAEs Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala. But his involvement with the Egyptian dictatorship is likely to be his most controversial, both because of its overthrow of a democratic government and the scale of bloodletting it has unleashed – and because of Egypts central role in the Middle East where he has been the peace envoy of the Quartet of the US, EU, UN and Russia since 2007. Last week a group of former British ambassadors and political figures joined a campaign to call for Blair to be sacked as Middle East envoy, citing his negligible achievements in the role, his defence of military intervention in Iraq and Syria and the blurring the lines between his public position as envoy and his private business dealings in the Middle East. Chris Doyle, of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, said his business interests and peace envoy roles were incompatible and create a huge conflict of interest.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Jul 2014 18:26:15 +0000
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