Britannia Radio

08 September 2009 1:08 PM

The Lisbon Yes man with links to Libya

Stay with me for five short hops, and I will take you from Colonel Gaddafi and Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, to the ‘Ireland for Europe’ campaign -- more, to questions about who is backing this slick and well-funded Yes-to-Lisbon propaganda outfit being run by Pat Cox, an Irish former president of the European Parliament who has turned himself into a corporate lobbyist in Brussels.

The connections will illuminate the sort of company with which the Irish Yes campaign feels comfortable.

Start at one. The mass-murderer Megrahi has just been set free from prison in Scotland and returned to Libya.

Two, last week Jack Straw, the British Secretary of State for Justice, admitted for the first time that a Libyan oil deal with BP was an essential part of the government’s decision to included Megrahi in a prisoner transfer deal.

Three, the oil deal was worth $900million and struck with BP six weeks after Megrahi was included in the prisoner transfer agreement. A report in the Telegraph at the weekend said that BP had warned the British government that the failure to include Megrahi in the deal could damage BP’s interests, but BP denied actually mentioning Megrahi.

Four, up until a week ago, the chairman of BP was the former Irish European Commissioner, Peter Sutherland. In 2004, Sir Mark Allen, a Middle East expert, resigned from the British intelligence service MI6 to join Sutherland’s BP for £200,000 a year. Six months before joining BP, Sir Mark chaired a secret meeting with Colonel Gaddafi’s spy chief in London, which included discussion of the Megrahi case. It turns out it was Mr Sutherland’s ex-spook who then lobbied the British justice secretary. He urged his old friend Mr Straw to speed up an agreement over prisoner transfers, which had been expected to lead to Megrahi’s return, to avoid jeopardising a trade deal with Libya worth up to £15billion to Mr Sutherland’s BP.

Five, Sutherland is a patron of Ireland for Europe, of which Pat Cox is campaign director. The organisation’s website does not disclose the extent or source of its funding nor whether fabulously-rich Sutherland has contributed financially to the cause. Whether he has or not Sutherland has -- and if he hasn't, Cox's corporate clients ought to be asking some questions about Cox's powers of persuasion -- his position in Ireland as a former Attorney General and European Commission is worth plenty to Cox's propaganda campaign, so the 'Ireland for Europe' Yes campaign has embraced him.

Me, personally, the only way I could embrace someone who worked to get a deal worth billions resulting in the release of the man who killed 270 men, women and children in a fireball over Scotland is if I were wearing the kind of kit you’d wear to unclog London sewers. However, Cox and his Yes-to-Lisbon colleagues appear not to mind the smell coming off the BP recently-ex-chairman.

I suppose that since Sutherland is now one of the richest bankers on the planet Cox is willing to hold his nose. That is the sort of pass you can get when you are also chairman of Goldman Sachs International, part of the globally-greedy Goldman’s which has famously and accurately been denounced in America as ‘a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity relentlessly jabbing its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’. Perhaps, since Mr Cox is a professional Brussels lobbyist running two lobbying firms which he has kept unregistered, maybe he doesn’t notice the smell.