Tom Bower is an English investigative journalist who for more than three decades has been winning plaudits for his eye-opening books about such figures as war criminal Klaus Barbie, newspaper baron Robert Maxwell, business tycoon Richard Branson, and Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson. In 2003, he won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award for an exposé of corruption in English soccer.

Now (speaking of corruption) he’s published Broken Vows – Tony Blair: The Tragedy of Power, which tears back the curtain on the former British prime minister. Several excerpts from Bower’s book have been serialized in the Daily Mail, and they’re all of immense interest, probing Blair’s incompetent moves on education, health, and immigration, his missteps on Afghanistan and Iraq, his bellicose relationship with Gordon Brown, and much else. But three excerpts contained revelations about Blair the post-Downing Street wheeler-dealer – the useful stooge par excellence – that will be of special interest to readers of this website.

Bower takes us back to 2007, when Blair resigned from the top post and took up the role of Middle East envoy for the U.N., E.U., U.S., and Russia. Unfortunately, that position – however prestigious – was unpaid, and Blair, after living on a prime minister’s modest salary for a decade, was ready to be rich.

Very, very rich. 

He mentioned this desire to his former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell. Powell then spoke with a headhunter, Martin Armstrong. He, in turn, had a meeting with the CEO of J.P. Morgan, Jamie Dimon, who, meeting with Blair, offered him $100,000 to sit on the bank’s board. But Blair was insulted. $100,000? For an ex-PM? Hewanted more. Lots more. Forty times more. Specifically, he wanted “at least £3 million a year, a five-year contract as an adviser and a percentage of every contract he initiated.”

He got it. For whatever reason, Morgan agreed to give him pretty much everything he wanted. And that was just the start. He also got a £180,000-a-year stint as climate-change advisor to a Swiss insurance firm. Plus another “advisory” gig on the payroll of Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France. And yet another job “representing” – whatever that means – “a wealth fund based in Abu Dhabi.”

While busying lining up these income-generating activities, Blair did something else: he set up (and hey, which one of us hasn’t, at one time or another?) a complex maze of limited-partnership shell companies through which to collect and channel cash from these and other paymasters – and to hide from authorities the true dimensions of the wealth he was now beginning to accumulate. This network of phony firms was, and is, no different from those set up by various crooks in places like Venezuela and Argentina whose hijinks we’ve recounted on this site over the past few months.

We’re talking about people like Tarek El Aissami, the thuggish governor of the Venezuelan state of Aragua, who, it will be remembered, lifts massive amounts of money from his state’s treasury and launders it through a vast network of shell companies, the chart of which, as we’ve noted, “looks more complex than the organization of the U.S. government itself.” And then there’s shipping magnate Wilmer Ruperti, who, in order to fool a Russian ship-rental enterprise into thinking it was chartering oil tankers to PDVSA, the Venezuelan national petroleum firm, set up a web of shell companies, to one of which he gave a name similar to PDVSA. Leasing a fleet of tankers from the Russian outfit, Ruperti then rented them to PDVSA at a profit. (And what does your dad do for a living?)

These are the kind of lowlife scum whose shabby stratagems Tony Blair, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, has plainly studied up and imitated. Following their example, he’s lined his pockets magnificently.

But as we’ll see tomorrow, his similarity to these useful stooges goes beyond the mere setting-up of fake front companies. Tune in.