Lord Powell's links with Syria show that business and diplomacy should not be mixed

Spectator, The, Nov 24, 2001 by Glover, Stephen

MEDIA STUDIES

Oh dear. I am not sure I really want to do this. I don't think I have ever met Charles Powell but everyone says what an absolutely charming chap he is. Probity and decency ooze from every pore. Intelligence is stamped over every feature. He describes himself as a Tory when many others of his sort in public life are scuttling for the undergrowth. He has a delightful wife, Carla. If this world were the place it should be, we would be about to settle down to lunch at the Savoy Grill. And yet I find myself on the other side of a gulf which before the end of this article will probably widen.

Lord Powell wrote a letter to this magazine last week. I do not mind that its tone was supercilious and perhaps a shade pompous, or even that he brushed aside my piece of the previous week as 'lamentable'. As the years go by, one's hide grows ever thicker. It would not matter; it could be forgotten. The trouble is that there was one tiny passage in that letter which was possibly a trifle misleading. I do not say that Lord Powell intended to mislead, only that the uninitiated reader, chancing upon what he wrote, might conceivably have gained a less than fully accurate impression. This is what Lord Powell said:

Mr Glover insinuates rather mistily that I had a conflict of interest in meeting President Assad because of my connection to Mr Wafic Said. I am indeed a friend of Mr Said's, and am proud to be so: he is a remarkable man and an extraordinary benefactor of good causes in this country. But I conduct no business on his behalf in Syria or elsewhere in the Middle East. Nor do I have any connection with First Saudi Investment Company to which Mr Glover refers.

Before we go any further, let me summarise the plot so far in as neutral a way as possible for new or forgetful readers. Lord Powell, Peter Mandelson and Wafic Said are friends with one another. I described them in my column of two weeks ago as a nexus, though I dare say they would reject that word. Lord Powell is, of course, a former private secretary to Margaret Thatcher, and Mr Mandelson needs no introduction. Mr Said is a Syrian-born multimillionaire, sometimes resident in England, the origins of whose vast fortune remain mysterious. We need to remember the following things. Point one: in January of this year Mr Mandelson took a holiday in Syria, apparently arranged by Lord Powell, and met the country's new president, Bashar alAssad. (I did not realise when I wrote my column two weeks ago that during his visit Mr Mandelson attended a party thrown by Mr Said.) Point two: about eight weeks ago Lord Powell himself went to Syria as Tony Blair's personal envoy to meet President Bashar al-Assad. Three weeks ago Mr Blair had an embarrassingly acrimonious meeting with Mr Assad in Damascus.

Some facts are disputed but these, I think, are not. The suggestion is not that Lord Powell, Mr Mandelson and Mr Said have done anything remotely illegal or corrupt. They most certainly have not. There is no reason why Lord Powell and Mr Mandelson should not meet President Assad, and if they wish to publish apparently concerted articles in different newspapers criticising the Israeli government, they are at perfect liberty to do so. I offered my story partly because this little nexus - I will stick by that word - at the heart of British public life seems fascinating; and partly because it concerned me that in representing Mr Blair, while being a friend and employee of Mr Said's, Lord Powell may have had a conflict of interest.

Now we should return to that letter. Lord Powell cannot be allowed to get away with describing himself as a 'friend' of Mr Said's. Of course he is that, but he is also, more pertinently, an employee, and he should have made that plain. The two men first met in the late 1980s when Lord Powell was the prime minister's private secretary and Mr Said was involved in the 20 billion AlYamamah arms contract between Britain and Saudi Arabia. In 1994, having left the Foreign Office, Lord Powell became a director of Said Holdings. In 1996 Mr Said made him a trustee (unpaid) of the Oxford Business School which he had just endowed. In February of this year Lord Powell became chairman of Sagitta Asset Management Ltd, which is Mr Said's main investment vehicle. Sagitta, and the companies with similar names clustered around it (e.g. Sagitta Investment Advisers Ltd), would repay hours of study. Last year Sagitta Asset Management made a loss of 1,238,395 on a turnover of 2,524,097 and paid its highest-paid director 910,000. All the Sagitta companies are subsidiaries of Sagitta International Limited, registered in Bermuda and controlled by Wafic Said.

So Lord Powell is much more than a friend of Mr Said's. That much, I think, we have established. The next question concerns his statement in his letter that he conducts no business on Mr Said's behalf in Syria or elsewhere in the Middle East. I am sure this is true of Lord Powell. But is it true of the company of which he is chairman? Sagitta Asset Management is, after all, Mr Said's main investment vehicle. Mr Said has business interests in the Middle East. In Syria his First Saudi Investment Company is part of an Arab consortium (also including the Bin Laden Construction Company) trying to secure lucrative mobile phone, Internet and hotel contracts. The least we can say is this: Lord Powell is chairman of a company controlled by a man who does conduct business in Syria and the Middle East. There is, by the way, no record of First Saudi Investment Company in the United Kingdom, though there is a company called First Saudi Services whose company address in Berkeley Square, London, happens to be located in the same building as Sagitta Asset Management Ltd.