Last
Wednesday the House of Commons went into a six week-long summer recess. As is
usual, MPs had an opportunity to present - in the Summer Adjournment debate
- the argument that Parliament should not enter recess until their matter of
concerns had been discussed.
So,
at 5.22 pm on 22 July, former Brexit department minister Conservative MP for
Wycombe Steve Baker, inter alia, made the following cryptic intervention:
“Many of the people
associated with the journey of formulating that trade policy, from the days
when the Legatum Institute special trade commission was doing that job, and I
was working with them, have been exposed to and suffered really vitriolic
attacks. Indeed, I would say that I have suffered malevolent attacks.
Today,
though, I want particularly to defend Christopher Chandler, who is the founder
of Legatum and that family of companies.
On 1
May 2018,* my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) made a
speech, the main object of which was Christopher Chandler. I wish to
acknowledge the nobility of my hon. Friend’s intent, because any Member of
Parliament presented with such a dossier would face difficult questions about
what to do with it. He referred to a call for an Intelligence and Security
Committee investigation of Mr Chandler, who does not appear in the recent ISC
report.
We
might, then, ask what Mr Chandler and others did. Legatum, the company that Mr
Chandler founded with three partners and of which he is the chairman, commissioned
an extensive forensic investigation into the claims by former members of law
enforcement and military intelligence. Richard Walton, the former head of
counter-terrorism command at the Metropolitan police performed his own
independent review of the findings of that investigation and concluded that the
allegations made by MPs in the House were totally false. Mr Walton has today
briefed me on the reasons why he has drawn that conclusion, and I am absolutely
satisfied that the reason why Mr Chandler has not been called to face charges
is because there are no charges that he should face. He is an innocent man and,
whatever the noble intent of my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight, I am
afraid that Mr Chandler has been unjustly dealt with.
Legatum told me today:
“When given the opportunity to present the truth, Legatum has overwhelmingly
prevailed in 13 out of 14 actions in the UK, resulting in a stream of
corrections, retractions and apologies.” This is, then, fundamentally a case of
justice. As I say, I believe that Mr Chandler has absolutely no case to answer;
it is just that under the system we currently have an individual has no
recourse to what is said in the House of Commons, other than a Member of
Parliament standing up for them. At some point the House is going to have to
deal with the issue of a right to reply.”
I
thank my hon. Friend for giving way; I was aware of what he was going to say.
He makes a really important point and, respectfully, I listen with care.
Clearly, a right of reply may strengthen the credibility of privilege, such
that we could see it as a questioning event in the public interest rather than
an accusatory one. I am in favour of that, because I want the privileges that
we have to have credibility. I hear what he says and I respectfully listen to
what he says and to what he says about his friends. I would merely say that
parliamentarians who care about the relevance of this place wrestle with what
the right thing to do and say is, sometimes in complex and difficult
circumstances. Does he agree that we all try to act in the best possible way?
If there is work to be done on updating privilege, I am very happy to join
that.
Baker
rejoined:
“I would not expect my
hon. Friend to go any further than that today and I am very grateful to him for
what he has said. That will have been heard and I am grateful to him.
In the urgent question
earlier, I said something about Legatum’s work on Russia, which I think is
honourable and noble. It would be strange indeed if Mr Chandler was connected
to Russian intelligence, given that he has put so much investment into fighting
the effects of Russian wrongdoing. I have already mentioned trade policy; it is
rare indeed that one can say that somebody has facilitated so much benefit to so
many people.
Let me say a little
more, because Mr Chandler is also a believer in private philanthropy. Since its
founding in 2012, the END Fund has facilitated the delivery of more than 720
million treatments relating to neglected tropical diseases, in 27 of the
world’s poorest countries. His Freedom fund has liberated 24,277 men, women and
children. His Luminos fund has, through its Second Chance accelerated-learning
programme, seen 132,611 children brought back to school. Mr Chandler is not a
man who should have been vilified; he is an inspiration.
Injustice is not always
brought down on the heads of the weak. Virtue does not always belong to the
poor. On this occasion, I have had to do something, which would have been far
better had I not had to do it, and that is to defend a man who is wealthy and
strong, but who has been placed in a position without a right to reply, and it
has been necessary for me to stand up today and to seek to set the record
straight and to defend his honour. I say again that Richard Walton, the former
head of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command, has investigated all
of these matters and said, “The allegations made in the House of Commons are
totally false.” If you will allow me Mr Deputy Speaker, my last words are from
a quote chosen by Mr Chandler himself:
“It is a privilege to
follow the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West).
I believe that the fight
to improve the integrity of our financial system and to do what we can to reduce
money laundering is critical in the fight against not only corruption but the
malign influence of authoritarian states. I very much welcome the work done by
my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) and the
right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge). I felt very proud to agree
to rebel against the Government— I am quite glad I did not have to—but
nevertheless, I thank them for that amendment.
On the point about
corruption and the malign influence of others, the right hon. Member for
Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris
Bryant), the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Adam
Holloway) and I have been shown documents that we believe relate to our
national security and money laundering. They originate from Monaco’s Sûreté
Publique, the police department that manages security and foreign residents in
that area. They are based on the Sûreté Publique’s own information and on
information provided by the French Direction de la Surveillance du
Territoire—the DST—which at the time, was the French equivalent of MI5.
These
documents are brief, terse, factual files, listing activities, associations and
judicial actions. They have been authenticated by senior French intelligence
sources and by British and American counterparts familiar with their contents.
The documents link a noted individual in this country with Russian
intelligence. These files are dated from 2005 and cover the period from the
mid-1990s. The documents concern Christopher Chandler and his
brother—Christopher Chandler is a public figure, owing to the Legatum
Institute. In citing this evidence, I note the words of the right hon. Member
for Exeter, who in November 2017 called for the House’s Intelligence and
Security Committee to examine Mr Chandler.
According
to the French security services, as recorded by their colleagues in Monaco—and
clearly, I am confident that these documents are genuine—Mr Chandler is
described as having been
“an
object of interest to the DST since 2002 on suspicion of…working for the
Russian intelligence services.”
I repeat:
“an object of interest to
the DST since 2002 on suspicion of…working for the Russian intelligence
services.”
“I first raised concerns
about Legatum and Mr Chandler back in November. Does he agree that the
information that he has just put in the public domain, combined with the
growing concern about corruption, money laundering and the sale of passports in
Malta, where Chandler has just acquired citizenship, demands urgent investigation
by the UK authorities now?
“I am most grateful for
that intervention. I am aware that the right hon. Gentleman has seen these
documents and that he shares my concerns. I believe that the right hon. Member
for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, should he have the privilege of being called to
speak, will talk further on that point and make reference to these files.
Christopher Chandler’s
personal file is marked “File code S”, a DST marker indicating, if I understand
correctly, a high or higher level of threat to France. In France, the letter
“S” is now used to designate radical Islam. In Monaco then, it was used to
designate counter-espionage. As I have said, Mr Speaker, I believe that other
Members, if you wish to call them, may cite further details—the right hon.
Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, the hon. Member for Rhondda, the right hon.
Member for Exeter or my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham.
I wish to state
explicitly that I make no criticism of the staff at Legatum, nor those people
who have engaged with its charitable work, nor members of the public, nor,
clearly, Members of this House who have dealt with this institution. I have
thought long and hard before making this statement, but I have done so because
I believe, and the five of us believe, that it is in the national interest to
do so. If people like Mr Chandler are vulnerable to malign influence—maybe he
is an innocent party in this, who knows?—especially if the information on them
is covert, that matters to our democracy.
In November 2017, the
Prime Minister highlighted the danger from Russia of subversion. I take my lead
from her when she said that the Russian regime was trying to “undermine free
societies”. I also read the excellent piece in The Sunday Times this
weekend looking at how Russian bots may have manipulated elections. One of the
problems in elections is that if they are manipulated successfully, the winning
side does not want to know and the losers plead sour grapes, so the answer is
to do what we can to strengthen our electoral system before it is too late.
“I commend the hon.
Gentleman for what he has said and fully concur with what he has argued—I have
seen the papers as well and I have come to the same conclusion as him. Does he
think that the Magnitsky clause will make a significant difference in our being
able to tackle this kind of hidden pervasive influence in British society and
British politics?”
“Anything that helps us
is important because we need to keep our society free of covert and malign
influence. I was in the States last week, as the hon. Gentleman knows, and I am
working with Congressmen there and in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, so
that we can combine best practice. That is important because a counter-propaganda
Bill is going through the United States Congress—do we need that here, etc.?
If I see information of
this kind, I have a choice: I can disregard it and become complicit or, if it
is genuine, I can put it in the public domain. It might be that Committees will
wish to have access to this information, and I suspect that those who have it
will provide it to any of the six Committees investigating Russia, if they wish
to do so. It might be that Mr Chandler can provide a satisfactory explanation
or argue that these relationships, if they existed, are now historical or have
been misrepresented in the documents. I do not use privilege lightly, Mr
Speaker. He might wish to offer evidence, written or oral, to any of those six
Committees, whose work I am supporting, in a modest way, as secretary to the
Russia steering group. I look forward to his response— I am quite sure there
will be one.
I will be writing to the
Prime Minister in the coming weeks to suggest further measures to strengthen
our democracy and electoral system. The struggle
of our generation is how we deal with authoritarian states and their actors,
official or proxy, who use free and open societies to damage those free and
open societies. We need to do something about it. Increasingly, Members now see
that covert malign influence from authoritarian states, most commonly our
friends in the Kremlin but also elsewhere, is a real and present danger to our
nation, to our financial system—hence this debate—and to the
transparency of our democracy and electoral system, not to mention the
Kremlin’s ability to conduct acts of violence and murder on our soil. We have a
duty to speak up and to use this House for the public good. That is what I am
doing now.
‘Truth ultimately
prevails where there are pains to bring it to light.’
I have taken those pains
today. Let truth prevail.”
Annex
Billionaire Christopher
Chandler denies spy claims
MPs told
parliament that the New Zealand-born businessman had links with Russian
intelligence
Legatum Group
founder Christopher Chandler. Photograph: Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters
Legatum Group
founder Christopher Chandler. Photograph: Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters
In an
interview with the Guardian, the New Zealand-born Christopher Chandler shrugged
off the claims made last week by a group of cross-party MPs, who cited
documents which suspected him of “working for Russian intelligence services”.
The claims
were made under parliamentary privilege. They were based on files written by
Monaco’s security services, including information from France’s DST foreign
intelligence agency. Chandler is described as an “object of interest” to the
DST because of his alleged Kremlin ties.
Chandler
dismissed the claim: “No, I’m not a Russian spy. I don’t speak Russian. I don’t
know anybody in the Russian state thing.”
He said he
was baffled by the documents and had no idea he had been under surveillance.
The French never contacted him, he said, and their operation went nowhere. “We
lived peacefully in Monaco for 20 years. The whole thing is insane.”
Chandler
funds the Legatum Institute, a London-based thinktank which has been
accused of advocating for a hard Brexit. The Labour MP Ben Bradshaw, who has
raised questions about the Kremlin’s possible role in the EU referendum, has
called on the authorities to investigate. Legatum said it was an “absurd
accusation to say that they had an undue influence on Brexit”.
A series of
exposés by the Mail on Sunday
claimed that the institute’s former economics director, Shankar Singham, held
clandestine meetings with Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. The goal was to pile
pressure on Theresa May to leave the single market and customs union.
Chandler, who
lives in Dubai and received Maltese citizenship in 2015, insisted that Legatum
did not have a firm stance on Brexit. Its focus was prosperity, he said.
“Brexit is not our game,” he insisted.
He added that
he knew of Nigel Farage but was only dimly aware of Arron Banks, the main
financial backer of Leave.EU, which was fined last week by the electoral
commission for multiple breaches of expenditure guidelines.
Asked if
Russia had sought to influence the outcome of the referendum by backing leave,
possibly through undercover methods, Chandler said: “I’m totally unqualified to
comment. Is Russia capable of doing that? No question. Did they actually do it?
I don’t know. They certainly didn’t do it through us.”
He was
reluctant to offer an opinion on whether the Kremlin was trying to sabotage or
undermine western democracy. Nor would he say if it had sought to help Donald
Trump win the 2016 US election – the consensus view of all US intelligence
agencies.
Chandler
described the recent attempted murder in England of the former Russian spy
Sergei Skripal as “abhorrent”. “Probably it’s what it looks like,” he said when
asked who he thought was to blame, but stressed that he was “unqualified” to
judge if Moscow was ultimately behind the nerve agent operation.
The
businessman was already rich when he invested in Russia soon after the end of
the USSR. He said he earned “hundreds of millions” from his stakes in various
companies, but also invested “hundreds of millions” and lost large sums in 1998
when the Russian economy collapsed.
Asked if he
was the beneficiary of a corrupt system in the 1990s, which created the
oligarchs but made most ordinary Russians considerably poorer, Chandler said:
“We genuinely believed we could be a force for good [in Russia] by bringing our
investment experience.”
Chandler and
his brother Richard ended up with a 4% stake in the energy company Gazprom. He
said that as a minority shareholder in Russia, he came up against “well
entrenched interests”. They placed damaging “kompromat” about him in the
Russian media. Some of it may have reached Monaco, he suggested.
The Mail on
Sunday reported over the weekend
that the Chandlers backed Vladimir Putin’s attempt to oust Gazprom’s chief
executive and to replace him with a St Petersburg ally, Alexey Miller. The
paper cited a recent pamphlet written by Richard Chandler.
It said the
Chandlers managed to appoint their own candidate to Gazprom’s board of directors
and then “appealed directly” to the president, paving the way for Miller’s
appointment. Chandler acknowledged corruption at Gazprom but said he had fought
against it.
He described
his brother’s version of events as wrong and said he had not heard of Miller
when he got the top Gazprom job in 2001.
Chandler said
he never met Putin and met Miller just once, in the summer of 2003. “I didn’t
spend enough time to get the measure of him,” he said. Chandler said he offered
ideas via an interpreter on how Gazprom might be reformed.
In 2006
Chandler exited from the Russian market when he separated his business affairs
from those of his brother. Richard Chandler continued to trade Gazprom stocks.
The French and Monaco intelligence files stretch to 85 pages, it is understood.
The
businessman visits the UK rarely and does not often given interviews. He has
been described as secretive. “I don’t have any secrets. I’m a regular person
who likes his privacy,” Christopher Chandler told the Guardian, speaking from
Legatum’s townhouse office in Mayfair.
Chandler said
he felt aggrieved the MPs had not contacted him before making their “erroneous”
claims in the House of Commons. He said he spent several hours last week
sitting in Portcullis House, where MPs have their offices, trying
unsuccessfully to meet them and to make his case in person.
Lawyers for
Chandler have written to several parliamentary committees asking them not to
publish the Monaco “dossier”. To do so, they argue, would infringe the
businessman’s rights.
And what
about Brexit? Chandler is unwilling to say whether it’s a good idea. Or a bad
one. “I think it’s up to the UK to determine,” he said. “It will be determined
by what you do with it. You can make a success or a failure out of it.”
|
|
Documents appear to contradict denials by
Christopher Chandler that he and his brother Richard (left) helped Putin’s
associates take control of Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom.
www.dailymail.co.uk
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Richard Chandler (businessman)
From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
New Zealand businessman
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Richard
Chandler
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Born
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Richard Fred Chandler
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Nationality
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New Zealand
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Occupation
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Investor
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Net worth
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US$3.2 billion (August 2018)[1]
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Spouse(s)
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Parent(s)
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Relatives
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Richard Fred
Chandler (born 1958/59)
is a New Zealand-born[2] billionaire businessman.
He is chairman of the Clermont Group, a Singapore-based business group that
invests in public and private companies across a range of industries, including
energy, financial services, consumer, and healthcare.[3]
Chandler "has a reputation for buying struggling companies and
successfully rebuilding them," according to Australian Broadcasting
Corporation News.[4]
He also has been known to "take a business approach to philanthropy."[5]
Contents
Born in New
Zealand, Chandler is the son of beekeepers Robert and Marija Chandler, who
launched and operated Chandler House, a department store in Hamilton, New Zealand.[6]
Chandler was
formerly CEO of the Sovereign group of companies, in partnership with his
brother, Christopher Chandler. Between 1986 and 2006,
Sovereign invested in companies and governments in Asia, Africa, Latin America
and Eastern Europe, and in industries including telecommunications, electric
utilities, steel, oil and gas, banking and oil refining.[2][7]
The brothers
split their assets in 2007 with Richard Chandler creating Orient Global and the
Clermont Group[8]
while Christopher Chandler starting Legatum Capital.[9]
Richard's investment style has been described as deep value investing,
primarily in global emerging markets and especially in distress situations.[2]
Orient Global
changed its name to Richard Chandler Corporation in April 2010 before becoming
the Chandler Corporation in 2013, and the Clermont Group in 2016. The company
"is a long-term value investor that believes well-governed companies play
a fundamental role in creating national prosperity," according to its
website.[3]
Richard
Chandler's business ventures have been tinged with themes of contrarian
investment, corporate governance and social responsibility, especially by
investing in and managing companies with national socio-economic implications.[10]
He once told Institutional Investor, "We do have
altruistic motives that some investors who are looking for a path of least
resistance find hard to understand, but we don’t want to be defined by our
corporate governance battles. We are value investors with a sense of
responsibility, not activists."[2]
The Chandler
brothers were involved in a highly publicized incident in 2005. Sovereign sold
its investment in South Korea's SK Corp., at the time South Korea's
third-largest oil conglomerate, after the board refused to oust chairman and
CEO Chey Tae Won. Chey had been convicted of accounting fraud for illegally
trading stocks. Sovereign had invested in the company just after Chey's arrest,
hoping to turn it around. Richard Chandler and his brother tried twice
unsuccessfully to remove Chey and ultimately pulled out for ethical reasons. By
that point they had improved the company and profited US$728 million.[2]
In 2007 Richard
Chandler launched a US$100 million education initiative in the developing world
with the focus to build low-cost private education opportunities in India.[7]
Furthermore, he invested in a global chain of international K-12 schools called Nobel Education Network.[11]
Multiple media
outlets reported in 2012 that Chandler considered investing in the Tasmanian
logging company, Gunns, but ultimately decided
not to.[12]
Yahoo Finance
reported in June 2013 that Chandler's company acquired an 80% stake in Hoan My
Medical Corporation, Vietnam's largest private hospital group. According to the
article's author, the transaction "complements the healthcare businesses
the Chandler Corporation owns and operates in Indonesia and the Philippines,
positioning it to become a leading private healthcare provider in Asia."[13]
Chandler is
married to Kady Leyau, a business woman, former model, actress, and VJ at
Taiwan MTV.[15][16]
- ^ Jump up to: a b
c
d
"Forbes profile: Richard
Chandler". Forbes. Retrieved 22 August 2018.
- ^ Jump up to: a b
c
d
e
f
The Secrets of Sovereign,
Institutional Investor, March 2006.
- ^ Jump up to: a b
"Chandler Corporation".
- ^ Gunns Saviour a Reclusive
Billionaire, ABC News,
February 2012.
- ^ 48 Asian Altruists, Forbes, February 2008.
- ^ "Our story". Legatum. Retrieved 13
February 2018.
- ^ Jump up to: a b
"The World's Billionaires
(2009)", Forbes,
November 2009.
- ^ "New Zealander Richard
Chandler: Forbes Lister And The Big Player In Equity Markets".
International Business Times AU. Retrieved 5 December 2018.
- ^ McSheehy, Will (11 October 2006). "Chandler Brothers split up
interests". The New Zealand
Herald. Bloomberg.
Retrieved 5 November 2011.
- ^ "Richard Chandler,
Sino-Forest, and how $10 million turned into $5 billion","Santangels Review", July
2011.
- ^ "Open Corporate".
opencorporates.com. Chrinon Ltd. Retrieved 10 October 2014.
- ^ Gunns blames Greens for
billionaire blow, The
Sydney Morning Herald, March 2012.
- ^ Chandler Corporation Acquires an
80% Shareholding in Vietnam's Hoan My Medical Corporation, Yahoo Finance,
June 2013.
- ^ "Leading Philanthropists
Announce Co-Impact, A Global Collaborative for Systems Change, with US
$500 Million in Planned Initial Funding - Co-Impact".
Co-Impact. 15 November 2017. Retrieved 6 April 2018.
- ^ "Belmont Rd GCB fetches
S$33.8m or S$2,243 psf". businesstimes.com.sg. Retrieved
27 August 2018.
- ^ "Luxury bungalows at Belmont
Road, Sentosa Cove sold for more than $33 million".
edgeprop.sg. Retrieved 27 August 2018.
