How Tony Blair wooed Chinese leaders for a Saudi oil company

Leaked documents have revealed how Tony Blair lobbied Chinese leaders for the Saudi Arabian oil company he worked with in 2010.

PetroSaudi paid the former prime minister's firm a monthly fee of £41,000, as well as an additional two per cent cut of each successful deal, according to a series of emails seen by The Guardian.

The documents show that Blair would arrange introductions to senior officials in China.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"[It] shows his influence in one of the most important areas of global economic cooperation this century: between the oil sands of the Middle East and hydrocarbon-hungry China," says the paper.

Details of the arrangement were first disclosed by The Sunday Times in 2014, but the Guardian investigation provides further insight.

London-based oil firm PetroSaudi was founded by Prince Turki bin Abdullah Al Saud, one of King Abdullah's seven sons, and his business associate, Tarek Obaid, an advisor to the Saudi royal family.

Blair travelled to China in 2010, to lobby senior political figures, including the then vice-premier, Wang Qishan, on behalf of the company.

"Blair's team sold [him] as someone who could help 'unlock situations which might otherwise be blocked by political factors' in places such as China and Africa," reports the Guardian.

Although the newspaper says it "has seen no evidence that Blair acted improperly", it predicts that the revelations will provoke fresh criticism of the former politician's undisclosed business interests and raise questions about potential conflicts of interest during his time as the Middle East peace envoy for the Quartet of the US, UN, EU and Russia.

"Concerns have been raised that, since leaving office, he has created an opaque network of financial interests that stretch from the United Arab Emirates to Kazakhstan and America," it says.

His spokesperson insists there was no conflict of interest, saying: "It is ludicrous to suggest that we would use PetroSaudi for anything related to Quartet work and our contract with them clearly stipulated that this could not occur."