The mystery of Tony Blair's finances

[Hopeless Romantic]

The former prime minister Tony Blair has received millions of pounds through an unusual mixture of commercial, charitable and religious income streams. Since he stepped down from office in 2007, his financial affairs have been described by observers as "Byzantine" and "opaque". The Guardian is now launching an online competition offering a prize to the person who can shine the brightest light on those financial structures.

Blair has a commercial consultancy, called Tony Blair Associates, plus jobs advising a US bank and a Swiss insurer. He has a multimillion pound book deal. He also has a charity, the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative, and another called the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. But much of the income, which includes charitable donations from other sources, has been funnelled through a structure called Windrush Ventures No 3 Limited Partnership. Our contest asks: what is Windrush?

Blair has a complex web of structures involving 12 different legal entities handling the unprecedented millions he is receiving since he stepped down from office in 2007.

So mystifying are the former prime minister's financial structures – which involve highly specialised limited partnerships and parallel companies – that the Guardian today launches an open invitation to tax specialists and accountants to attempt to explain the motivation behind such structures. We have published the Companies House documents and other legal papers regarding the structure of the partnerships at guardian.co.uk and invite expert comment via our site at guardian.co.uk/politics/series/blair-mystery.

There is no suggestion Blair is doing anything illegal. But he refuses to explain the purpose of the secretive partnerships.

Tax specialists say Blair could use these unusual arrangements at some point in the future to seek to transfer millions tax-free to his four children.

Blair denies, however, that the structures are such an inheritance tax avoidance scheme, known as a "family limited partnership".

"Family limited partnerships" were being publicized to lawyers and accountants in November 2007 at the time Blair's lawyers started to set up his structures.

Known in the trade as "Flips", family limited partnerships are a way of getting round stricter inheritance tax rules in the 2006 budget, imposed by Gordon Brown while Blair was still prime minister.

Jay Krause, a partner at the law firm Withers, is credited with inventing the Flips concept for use in the UK. He told the Guardian it is "entirely possible" to use such Blair-style partnership structures legally to avoid inheritance tax.

Instead of setting up trusts, which are now heavily taxed, children can be granted an ongoing interest in the partnership's wealth, as a "limited partner".

There are other more conventional uses of such specialised limited partnerships, accountants say. These include venture capital schemes, private equity investments, or short-term projects such as film finance.

In each of those cases, the so-called limited partner invests cash, but has little control over what is done with it by the general partner.

In return, they are protected from unlimited liability if anything goes wrong.

None of this seems to apply to Tony Blair, however. No outside "angel" investing cash in Blair Enterprises appears in the records. The structure is so artificial that in one part of it, Blair is, in effect, forming partnerships with himself.

The former prime minister refuses to offer any explanation of why he is using the complex structures.

As they stand, they were recently described by the Financial Times as "neither tax efficient nor managerially useful".

Millions of pounds have been funnelled through one arrangement called Windrush Ventures and a second parallel structure called Firerush Ventures.

They may handle some of the large amounts coming in from Blair's book deal, his six-figure speaking fees, his banking and insurance consultancies, and his pay from Middle Eastern regimes.

The Windrush structure pays for Blair's £560,000 a year lease on his Mayfair office, in Grosvenor Square near the US embassy.

Blair's profit-making commercial schemes involve 12 different Windrush and Firerush legal entities centring on a pair of "limited partnerships".

His spokesman, former No 10 staff member Matthew Doyle, refuses to say who Blair's partner is.

Windrush Ventures No 3 LP, for example, consists on paper of a partnership between an entity owned by Blair himself and an anonymous off-the-shelf company.

This off-the-shelf company, which appears to have been set up by Alex Harle, Blair's lawyer at the Westminster solicitors Bircham, Dyson Bell, is merely called BDBCO No 819 Ltd.

Set up as a nominee company to act as a trustee or an executor of a will, this entity does not reveal its ownership on records at Companies House. Instead, its shares are listed as held by a second off-the-shelf entity, BDBCO No 822.

This company in turn conceals its true ownership. Its shares are listed as held by the lawyers, acting as nominees.

This partner company does not appear to have made any significant investments on its own behalf. The register shows that its sole contribution to the partnership when it was set up in December 2007 was the sum of £19.

The Guardian asked Doyle who owned Blair's partner company. We also asked for the terms of the partnership agreement which divides up the rights to Blair's money. We asked the purpose of the schemes, and what funds had been paid into them.

Doyle refused to answer. He even refused to say why the name "Windrush" was chosen.



In a written statement, he said: "Why we set it up ... was in order to allow Mr Blair's office sensibly to administer his different projects, in accordance with relevant regulations and company law in the UK. He has an operation that has over 80 people working for it around the world. This was done on the basis of advice."

The limited financial information available under company law shows that more than £6m has been passed through the Windrush partnerships, and on to a company owned personally by Blair, called Windrush Ventures Ltd.

The £6m is extracted from the partnership funds by being described as "management fees" going to the general partner – which is a Blair-owned entity.

There is no published record of what other cash or assets remain in the partnership, or how it will be distributed.

The opacity of Blair's Windrush structures is increased by the fact that they have also been used to handle some charitable donations for projects in Africa.

A Sainsbury family charity, the Gatsby foundation, declares it has paid a total of £992,000 to the Windrush limited partnership. This was for charitable projects in Rwanda, in the two financial years to April 2009.

The Gates foundation, funded by the founder of Microsoft, declares it paid $2.46m (£1.49m) to the Windrush LP in June 2008, for similar capacity-building projects in Sierra Leone.

Blair this year applied to set up a charity, the Tony Blair Africa Governance initiative, in February 2009, according to the Charity Commission.

But its application was not accepted until this month, partly because of its novelty and partly through concerns as to whether it was sufficiently separated from Blair's personal office arrangements.

The link with Blair and his office was "one of the issues we considered ... when looking at public benefit and the independence of the charity," the Commission said.

BLAIR'S WEALTH

Blair is estimated to be in the process of receiving up to £14m, making him one of Britain's wealthiest ex-prime ministers. This includes a £4.6m memoirs deal with Random House.

He is also receiving a series of US fees from the Washington Speakers Bureau for making speeches estimated to include a £600,000 signing-on fee; consultancies with the US bank, JP Morgan and with Swiss insurers Zurich Financial Services; and commercial consultancy deals through his private firm, Tony Blair Associates, with regimes in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates among others.

The growth in Blair's personal wealth was illustrated in May 2008, when he agreed to pay £5.75m for the late actor John Gielgud's Buckinghamshire residence, described as "a small stately home".

This was in addition to the £4.45m paid earlier for a London home in Connaught Square, together with an adjoining mews house.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/dec/01/mystery-tony-blair-finances