Three men in a boat
THE sordid row that has broken out amongst the guests who stayed on Queen K, an £80,000,000 yacht anchored off Corfu, reveals the real nature of our Labour and Tory rulers and those with whom they choose to consort. It’s the sleaze beneath the spin.
The first figure brought blinking into the limelight in the affair was Peter Mandelson, thrice New Labour minister and erstwhile EU Trade Commissioner. When Mandelson accepted a peerage from Gordon Brown, to return to Westminster from Brussels as Business Minister, his exit from the European Union was eased by “transitional parachute payments” of £78 million and a £1 million pension pot, which will be funded largely by the British taxpayer.
Mandelson famously said that “New Labour” was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. One wonders what his grandfather, Herbert Morrison, Deputy Prime Minister in the last real, patriotic and radical, Labour Government we ever had, would have thought of that, or of his grandson’s relentless toadying to the global super-rich.
Mandelson first met the infamous boat’s owner, Russia’s richest man Oleg Deripaska when he was flown to Moscow to do so by rich financier Lord Jacob Rothschild in his private jet. Lord R is the father of Nathaniel Rothschild, who first blew the gaff on the goings-on on Deripaska’s boat.
In his role as EU Trade Commissioner, Mandelson was indisputably in a position to do some very useful favours for his new mate Oleg. It is of course pure coincidence, for example, that during Mandelson’s period of office in Brussels the EU cut tariffs on aluminium. This alone was worth £50 million extra profit to Deripaska’s aluminium smelting empire, stolen by him and his cronies from the Russian people.
Mandelson then encouraged and assisted the progress toward EU membership of of Montenegro, a bit of Serbia carved out as a private fiefdom by sundry global marketeers. Mandelson’s helpful attitude towards Montenegro’s EU accession is, of course, wholly unconnected with the massive extra income this will convey to his nautical host Oleg, who by a pure happenstance owns the biggest aluminium smelter in Montenegro and whose produce will be able to be sold duty free across Europe if Montenegro joins the EU.
Joining this New Labour Eurocrat on the boat were Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osborne and Tory Party fundraiser Andrew Feldman, who fell foul of allegations by Nathaniel Rothschild that the Tories’ top fundraiser and the richest man in Russia discussed raising funds for the Tory party and laundering the donations via a British front company owned by the billionaire.
So who is their host, Oleg Deripaska? He made his fortune by exploiting the collapsing corpse of the USSR and plundering industries and resources built up by the blood, sweat and toil of the Russian people. Deripaska battened on to aluminium industry in Siberia and in 1995 he emerged Russian’s top aluminium entrepreneur but only after many of his business rivals had lost their lives in rather mysterious circumstances. Today Deripaska is caught up in a welter of lawsuits and payoffs – he recently paid London property speculators the Reuben Brothers around £300 million to drop a financial claim against him.
The revelations of the past few days concerning Osborne and Mandelson just goes to show how low Labour and Tories alike have sunk. That politicians from New Labour and the Tories, our two main political parties, are courting the likes of Deripaska should be a matter of concern for us all. Nye Bevan, Mandelson’s grandfather’s Cabinet colleague in that fine 1945-51 Labour Government, summed up the behaviour of people of their ilk in his immortal phrase, they are “lower than vermin….”
Martin Wingfield and Steve Johnson.
