Friday 5 April 2013


Blair Scorned at Home Builds Business Empire Abroad


BLOOMBERG: On a snowy morning in the middle of February, Tony Blair, looking trim from his four- to five-times- a-week workout regime, is sipping coffee in his office in London’s Mayfair district.

He’s sitting in a Georgian town house that was in the late 18th century the site of the first U.S. embassy to the Court of St. James’s. Now, almost six years after he resigned as British prime minister, it serves as the epicenter of a new Blair empire, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its May issue.

“If you become prime minister and step down in your early 50s,” Blair says, “what are you going to do? Play golf? It fills me with total dread.”

Blair, 59, has reinvented himself as a dealmaker, globe- trotting adviser and philanthropist. He presides over a network of companies and charities that operate in more than 20 countries, with financing from a tangle of private, corporate and government sources.

Since 2007, Blair and his firms have taken in at least 59 million pounds ($90 million). His charities have raised 25.5 million pounds. Last year, one of his eight companies, Windrush Ventures Ltd., booked a record 16 million pounds in revenue, up from 12 million pounds the previous year. A single bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM)., has paid the former Labour Party prime minister at least 10 million pounds since January 2008. » | Stephanie Baker | Bloomberg Markets Magazine | Friday, April 05, 2013


THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Tony Blair: I would have given David Cameron a 'run for his money': Tony Blair has boasted he would have given David Cameron a "run for his money" in the last election and could have been even richer if he was motivated by money. » | Rowena Mason, Political Correspondent | Friday, April 05, 2013