Inside the intriguing world of Tony Blair Incorporated

"Intriguing" is certainly one word for it....

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Telegraph

The Grosvenor Square headquarters of Tony Blair's myriad companies and charities. The former prime minister's extensive foreign travel means he is rarely there 

By Robert Mendick and Josie Ensor

The house acts as headquarters to Blair Inc, the unofficial name which Tony Blair’s activities have earned. It is from here that the former prime minister, among other things, makes his money.  

Interactive graphic: Tony Blair's extensive foreign travel mapped

 

Financial experts claim that his widespread portfolio of companies and properties have thrust him into the upper echelons of Britain’s super-rich. His fortune – hard to judge because of the secrecy that surrounds his various enterprises – could now be in the millions of pounds, possibly enough to push his name for the first time on to Britain’s unofficial rich list. Mr Blair, who with his wife Cherie owns seven properties, is probably among the 2,000 wealthiest people in Britain. 

One City accountant, who has examined Mr Blair’s companies’ accounts, said: “His total wealth is difficult to know but I would estimate it is in the range of £30 million to £40 million.” Mr Blair’s spokesman denies the former prime minister’s wealth is “anything remotely approaching” that amount.

Inside the Grosvenor Square house and spread across its floors are two companies, two charities and Mr Blair’s private office. In all, about 100 people are based there, although insiders say it is often much quieter because so many of his staff, among them several former Downing Street aides, are travelling at any one time. The offices, once the home of John Adams, the second US president who established the first American mission in London, are rented at a cost of £550,000 a year on a 10-year lease. They cover almost 6,000 sq ft. 

Mr Blair is rarely present, turning up perhaps once a month. An analysis by The Sunday Telegraph of his travels, garnered from published sources, shows that in 12 months Mr Blair made 61 trips abroad totalling almost 224,000 miles – the equivalent of travelling to the moon. A rough calculation suggests Mr Blair, who launched the charity Breaking the Climate Deadlock to combat global warming, has racked up 58 tons of CO₂ emissions in a year through jet travel alone. That’s about 30 times that of the average British adult. 

Mr Blair may have travelled far more than that but these are the trips we know about. He is reckoned to spend as little as two months a year in the UK. The trips, from April 1 2010 to March 31 last year, included frequent visits to Jerusalem, where he is a Middle East peace envoy; and to Africa, where his charities do much of their work. The US and China were also popular destinations. The trips occasionally appear to mingle business, philanthropy and pleasure. 

In the summer of 2010 he gave a speech in Shanghai before taking a family holiday with his wife and children in China. There is no mention of the speech on any of his charity’s websites, suggesting he may have been paid for it. In the space of two days he visited Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan in his capacity as paid adviser to JP Morgan, the US investment bank, and followed that with a faith foundation visit to nearby Sierra Leone. On the Nigerian leg of the journey, Mr Blair was accompanied by the bank’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, who announced plans for a new office in Lagos. 

In that time, up until March 31 last year, Mr Blair’s management company Windrush Ventures Limited – established to administer “all the various things he does in the world” – was paid £12 million and made profits of more than £1 million. The company’s tax bill was £315,000. 

As The Sunday Telegraph disclosed last week, the tax bill was low because administrative costs of almost £11 million, were offset against the company’s income. About £3 million in expenses went on paying Windrush Venture Ltd’s 26 staff and on office and equipment costs. That leaves about £8 million of expenses, which City accountants, who scrutinised the accounts could not explain. There are suggestions that at least some of that £8 million could in part be travelling expenses for Mr Blair and his entourage. Certainly two insiders, who have signed confidentiality agreements and therefore cannot talk openly about their experiences at Grosvenor Square, say not just Mr Blair but many of the staff were often away on foreign travel. 

“They spent an incredible amount of expenses on travel. It was absolutely ridiculous,” said one source. The source suggested that Mr Blair rarely, if ever, travelled by commercial airline, flying almost always by private jet. In the past, he has flown in private planes paid for by regimes of Col Muammar Gaddafi and Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame, who is accused of human rights abuses. 

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