“Even before the report Tony Blair had totally lost credibility among Palestinians,” the former Fatah minister Mohammed Shtayyeh said. It is unlikely that the Chilcot report will deter him in the Middle East either. “We hold Tony Blair in high esteem,” said Abdulai Bayraytay, a spokesman for the Sierra Leone government where AGI advised on the response to the 2014 Ebola crisis. Sir John Chilcot’s damning verdict on Tony Blair’s role in the Iraq war appears unlikely to reduce the former prime minister’s flow of multi-million-pound fees from international clients and influence in presidential palaces in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The Swiss insurance giant Zurich paid him to sit on its international advisory board from 2008-15, but there is no suggestion that he was dropped because of the impending Chilcot report.

Source: The Guardian July 07, 2016 18:19 UTC