Blackrock exposed:
Starmer saved Labour from ‘extremism’ under ‘Marxist leader’, says BlackRock CEO
Keir Starmer has been backed by one of the world’s most influential financiers, Larry Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, as he said the Labour leader now offers a “measurement of hope” by showing “real strength” in bringing Labour back to the centre ground of politics.
Hakluyt: Masters of the Great Game
Globalisation and cross-border mergers are increasing demand for Hakluyt’s brand of intelligence, Years after leaving MI6, Christopher James, is still involved in “the great game”, still savouring the whiff of romance and still at the centre of a global web.
Former spies are supposed to retire into oblivion, carrying their secret cargo of knowledge to the grave. Not him. The idea was to do for industry what we had done for the government,” he says. “In the services, you get to understand a great deal about the people who make things work. I felt what we provided might have some commercial value. You could say it was intuition about the ending of the Cold War.”
James, who served in the Special Air Service before MI6, founded Hakluyt & Company in April 1995 along with Christopher Wilkins, a former Welsh Guards officer and businessman.
Mike Reynolds, an ex-MI6 colleague, and Jeremy Connell, a former diplomat and business development manager for a law firm, became directors in 1995.
Michael Maclay, a former journalist, diplomat and special adviser to Douglas Hurd, former foreign secretary, and Carl Bildt, UN high representative in Bosnia, joined in 1997.
Wilkins retired in 1996.
So far Hakluyt has provided intelligence for 26 FTSE 100 companies and has a growing number of US and European clients.
Operating by word of mouth, the company sells information of a singular and sensitive kind. James describes what they produce as “the truth”. “The chairman of a company may be under immense pressure from senior managers to approve a contract, but a voice in the back of his head tells him something is not quite right. That is where we come in. We give focused, timely intelligence – we fill in the gaps.” Maclay adds: “We are there to answer specific questions – what the real agenda is, who is in whose pocket and what is the role of certain people.”
Maclay gives an example of an assignment. In 1997 a British company was tempted by a lucrative joint venture in the former Soviet Union when strategic mineral resources were privatised in an obscure republic. The slick Russian frontmen turned out to be ex-KGB agents with direct links to an international drugs cartel laundering money in the Caribbean. The company was advised to pull out.
Raising a china teacup at Hakluyt’s West End offices, James, managing director, reflects: “It would not be Hakluyt if there was no whiff of romance about it.”
It might be thought that his former masters would have been uneasy about former staff going corporate. But Sir David Spedding, then head of MI6, wished him luck with his venture as he does with everyone who leaves the service, says James. “Once you’re in, you’re in. And once you’re out, you’re out. There are absolutely no ties.” He is sure MI6 is not interested in Hakluyt’s activities. “They have far more important things to worry about.”
Support has come from a roll-call of establishment grandees – a clue to the contacts Hakluyt can muster.
Former foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind is supportive of the project; so too is Ian Lang, former secretary of state at the Department of Trade and Industry. Earl Jellicoe, president of the SAS Association provided early encouragement, as did the late Brigadier Sir Fitzroy Maclean, Winston Churchill’s personal envoy to Marshall Tito during the second world war. The current DTI “likes the idea”, according to James.
The Hakluyt Foundation
The company’s equivalent of a board, contains more eminent names:
Sir Peter Holmes, the foundation’s president and former chairman of Royal Dutch Shell Group.
Sir Brian Cubbon, former permanent under-secretary of state at the Home Office.
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Sir Peter Cazalet, chairman of the company and the foundation, former deputy chairman of BP and member of the top salaries review board.
Sir William Purves, former chairman of HSBC.
Lord Inge, former chief of defence staff.
Lord Trotman, former chairman and chief executive of Ford and a director of the New York Stock Exchange.
Baroness Smith of Gilmorehill, widow of John Smith, the former Labour party leader who was himself was a Steering Committee Member of the Bilderberg Group.
Lord Renwick, chairman of Robert Fleming, the investment bank is a special adviser.
Strategic Associations
To cap all these connections, Hakluyt formed a strategic agreement with Henry Kissinger. The former US secretary of state, guru of realpolitik, Nobel peace prize-winner and darling of the lecture circuit runs his own strategic consultancy, Kissinger Associates.
Kissinger’s company facilitates top-level introductions for Hakluyt and both will refer clients and cooperate on individual projects. It is almost a privatised version of “the special relationship”.
James said, “Kissinger is a statesman who has been at the very heart of American politics and I am extremely flattered. The Hakluyt Foundation has a vital role. It provides “reassurance we are not just a tearaway bunch of ex-government officials. It ensures Hakluyt abides by a code of practice, which has an absolute ban on doing anything illegal, any dirty tricks.”
Asked if this might disappoint some clients James was firm: “We just don’t do it.”
McClay added, “Nor does Hakluyt operate by tip fees for information. We talk to the high-ups, not the hard-ups.”
Hakluyt, like the services, regards paid-for information as less reliable than information given freely. The company has over 100 “associates” on its books some based in London, others at stations worldwide, formed by personal contacts, whose judgement the directors trust absolutely. They might be investigative journalists, diplomats’ wives, senior business people, former diplomats or consultants. They are “intuitive, determined, highly intelligent” and have intimate knowledge of the country in which they operate. Associates are free to turn down assignments and are expected to use their judgment about dangerous situations.
McClay said, “When Hakluyt receives an assignment, it calls up to five associates back to London to be briefed and then deploys them. The work essentially involves talking to the right people. It’s all about people, and following up contacts. Each associate is given different questions and works independently. The associates might well come back with contradictory information. When this happens, the directors make a careful judgement of the material in London before submitting a final report. We can’t just say: ‘On the one hand, and on the other’, we have to give answers.”
McClay added, “Hakluyt pays good professional rates although some associates prefer a case of claret. The company will not disclose its rates to clients. Given the nature of the work, fees are not insubstantial, and vary widely although not as much as a top law firm.”
Much of Hakluyt’s work has been concentrated in the former Soviet Union and China, but the company has carried out jobs in 57 countries, including Indonesia, India, Latin America, Korea, the Middle East and, lately, in Europe.
McClay said, “Globalisation and the rise in cross-border mergers have led to a growing demand for accurate and well-sourced information. Privatisations worldwide and resulting joint ventures form its core business and organisations need “someone to refine a complicated world and provide answers. Hakluyt has been helped by the management trend of outsourcing: “In the old days, companies would have had someone who would know the situation in a particular market, but they have outsourced so many requirements.”
And the significance of the name?
In 1582 Richard Hakluyt argued for the colonisation of north America as a base for discovering the Orient. Centuries later it was said of him: “He is the silent man, seated in the dark corner, who is content to listen and remember”. Is Hakluyt attempting to recapture a fading imperial grandeur? “When we set up, it was to help British companies stay ahead of the competition,” said James. “We now have international clients, but there is still something in staying ahead of the game, of expansion in our message.”
Click to access FTandTheScotsmanHakluytarticles.pdf
The 2014 Independence Referendum and Project Fear’s war against democracy in Scotland
The revelation that “Better Together” was financed by wealthy supporters and commercial conmen is not surprising since dodgy financial funding is a well-practised trait of the Party.
But the active involvement of former MI6 agents and other characters with a background in ‘intelligence’ and ‘ex-military’ is of great concern to Scots since the threat to Scottish democracy in 2023 is as powerful as before with the introduction to Scotland of the shady “John Smith Foundation” fronted by former MI6 and Hakluyt official, Lady Smith.
The undernoted donated significant funds to the “Better Together” campaign
Christopher Wilkins, ex MI6: The former Welsh Guards officer who read for the bar and attended the school of Military Intelligence became the founding chairman and architect of the intelligence-gathering organisation that he named “Hakluyt” which continues to flourish.
Currently, he is chairman of a renewable energy company and lives in London and the Scottish Borders. He was a member of the Scottish Economic Council for ten years.
Hakluyt, which continues to employ ex-spies, was later found to have infiltrated and spied on Greenpeace on behalf of Shell and BP. And, working for Hilary Clinton, it actively undermined Donald Trump’s campaign for the Presidency of the United States of America by providing false evidence in a report that he was working against the interests of his country with President Putin.
Sir Keith Craig, ex MI6: The ‘army veteran’ is a managing director of Hakluyt.
Simon Crane: The CEO of Edinburgh International (EI), a private military contractor (founded in Baghdad in 2003).
It provides security staff and associated services to governments worldwide.
The security industry is valued at over £100 million annually. The United States and Great Britain account for over 70% of the world’s market.
The organisation’s regional headquarters is located in the United Arab Emirates and is described as the “prime operational, administrative and financial centre for the group activities outside of the UK and USA.”
Other offices are located in London and Guernsey (UK), Washington D.C. (US) Baghdad (Iraq), Kabul (Afghanistan), Khartoum (Sudan) and Dubai (United Arab Emirates) with “affiliate” offices in Kentucky, North Carolina, Florida in the US.
It also has “representative” offices in the British Virgin Islands, Fiji, New York, Ankara (Turkey), Amman (Jordan), Perth (Australia) and Nepal.
Edinburgh International (EI) was bought over and its assets were absorbed by Blackrock!!
BlackRock was born in the late 1980s, as a subsidiary of The Blackstone Group, a multinational private equity firm. Larry Fink was made director and CEO, despite having just all but ruined his reputation on Wall Street after costing his previous employer, investment firm First Boston, $100 million by making incorrect predictions about interest rates.
The Ghostbusters of Wall Street
The collapse of the Lehman Brothers boosted BlackRock’s business. Fink and his managers were specialists in analyzing portfolios of mortgage-backed securities which came in handy at a moment when investors and bankers were trying their best to limit damage. In no time, the team, working out of a backroom office, became known as the “Ghostbusters of Wall Street,” and soon, they received regular calls from the Federal Reserve whose Secretary, the US treasurer, Timothy Geithner, was on a first-name basis with the BlackRock boss.
Ten Facts about Blackrock
1. BlackRock oversees $10 trillion, making it the largest money manager in the world.
As of December 2021, BlackRock manages a staggering $10 trillion of other people’s money. That’s more than the gross domestic product of every country in the world, except for the US and China.
For its largesse in investment management, it’s a new firm by Wall Street institution standards. BlackRock was founded in 1988 by Fink, who also serves as the chairman, and seven others, including BlackRock President Robert Kapito and senior advisor Barbara Novick.
BlackRock’s makes most of its money handling investments for outside clients, mostly institutions like public pension plans, endowments, and foundations.
Nearly 60% of its overall assets under management are for institutional investors, most of which are products linked to stock markets. It also has a sprawling alternative investments business that oversaw some $265 billion in assets under management as of December, managing products across private equity, private credit, and hedge funds.
2. It runs a massive technology platform that oversees at least $21.6 trillion in assets.
In 1999, BlackRock started selling Aladdin, which analyses and tracks investors’ portfolios and can help professional money managers spot risks. Today, it is a juggernaut widely used in the money management industry and beyond.
One of the definitive descriptions of Aladdin and all its connections, a February 2020 report in the Financial Times, detailed its sheer scale:
“Vanguard and State Street Global Advisors, the largest fund managers after BlackRock, are users, as are half the top 10 insurers by assets, as well as Japan’s $1.5tn government pension fund, the world’s largest. Apple, Microsoft, and Google’s parent firm, Alphabet — the three biggest US public companies — all rely on the system to steward hundreds of billions of dollars in their corporate treasury investment portfolios.”
The report found some $21.6 trillion in assets sat on the platform from just a third of its 240 clients, the FT reported, citing public documents verified with the companies and first-hand accounts.
3. BlackRock has hired many former government officials into senior roles.
By the time Deese and Adeyemo got to BlackRock, they already had experience working in government. Deese was previously a senior advisor to President Barack Obama and served as deputy director of the National Economic Council, which he now leads under Biden.
Adeyemo, who was appointed as deputy Treasury secretary in the Biden administration, had previously worked as Obama’s senior international economics advisor. While at BlackRock, one of his roles was Fink’s interim chief of staff.
Pyle, who has worked as BlackRock’s global chief investment strategist, had also previously worked in Obama’s administration by the time he started at the asset manager.
He was a special assistant to the president on economic policy matters and also worked in the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget.
Thomas Donilon, who is now chairman of the asset manager’s research arm, previously served as national security advisor to Obama. (Donilon’s brother, Mike, was Biden’s chief strategist during his presidential campaign).
BlackRock has hired other former policy-makers and regulators. Dalia Blass, a longtime former Securities and Exchange Commission official who most recently ran the SEC’s investment management division, joined the firm this week to lead external affairs.
Blass now oversees the firm’s global public policy group and social impact and corporate sustainability teams, along with a new group formed to research stakeholder capitalism, according to BlackRock.
Coryann Stefansson, who previously worked on bank supervision matters at the Federal Reserve Board and held senior positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, joined BlackRock’s Financial Markets Advisory (FMA) unit in 2016. She left in 2019, according to LinkedIn.
4. The firm played a significant role in aiding the Federal Reserve in early 2020.
The FMA unit, which is effectively BlackRock’s consulting arm, separate from its investment management operations, had a significant role to play in the US government’s coronavirus pandemic response.
In March 2020, the Federal Reserve picked FMA to handle an emergency asset-purchasing program. There was no process where other asset managers could have bid for the job, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
After an analyst said on an April earnings call that investors viewed BlackRock’s mandate as a “bailout” for his firm or the exchange-traded fund industry broadly, Fink called the question “insulting.”
5. The Federal Reserve tapped BlackRock during the last financial crisis, too.
The investment manager had been there before, defending its connection to the Federal Reserve. During the global financial crisis of 2007-2009, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York asked BlackRock’s FMA division to handle assets of Bear Stearns and AIG, both on the verge of collapsing.
“They have access to information when the Federal Reserve will try to sell securities, and what price they will accept. And they have intricate financial relations with people across the globe,” Republican Senator Chuck Grassley told the New York Times at the time. “The potential for a conflict of interest is great and it is just very difficult to police.”
BlackRock has emphasized that the division handling Fed mandates, the FMA, is distinct from its core money management business to prevent conflicts.
6. Fink has been vocal on matters of climate change, urging other companies’ leaders to consider the associated risks.
“Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects,” he wrote in his open letter to chief executives in January.
“Disclosure should be a means to achieving a more sustainable and inclusive capitalism. Companies must be deliberate and committed to embracing purpose and serving all stakeholders — your shareholders, customers, employees, and the communities where you operate,” he said.
The firm rolled out related initiatives, like exiting investments that carry sustainability-related risks and launching new products that screen for exposure to fossil fuels.
7. But his firm has been scrutinized for its record of supporting shareholder requests for climate-related disclosures.
Morningstar, a firm that analyzes fund information, said in a September 2020 report that it found support for those type of requests rose at Fidelity, State Street Global Advisors, and Vanguard — but fell at BlackRock compared to the year prior.
“While 2020’s results mark a higher level of support than BlackRock had given such proposals from 2016 through 2018 — when its backing never made it to double digits — the 2020 level of ‘for’ votes was down to 14% from 25% in 2019,” analysts wrote of the 14 climate-related resolutions shareholders requested last year.
But BlackRock has wielded its power as a major shareholder more aggressively. As the second-largest institutional investor in oil giant Exxon, BlackRock made a splash in 2021 when it voted in support of three new directors supported by investment firm Engine No. 1 over Exxon’s approach to addressing climate change.
8. It has long been rumoured that Fink himself could head to DC.
Fink was reportedly under consideration by 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to run the Treasury Department. He was also rumoured to be under consideration for Biden’s administration.
But he has squashed that chatter. In 2020, private equity founder David Rubenstein asked Fink during Bloomberg’s virtual New Economy Forum how he would respond to a request from Biden to serve in his cabinet.
“Thank you for that honour, but I’m very happy at BlackRock. I’ve committed to my employees to my board and my family already. I’m staying in New York for the time being,” he said, according to a transcript of the event.
9. BlackRock has made lots of acquisitions.
Think of BlackRock as a firm that has gobbled up lots of competitors in its path over the years. The firm has purchased legacy businesses and fintech start-ups, looking to keep an edge as traditional money management isn’t as profitable or unique as it once was.
In 2020, the firm said it would acquire a California-based investment provider called Aperio for approximately $1 billion in cash. In 2019, BlackRock acquired eFront, a French start-up that runs alternative investment management software, for $1.3 billion.
In 2009, BlackRock acquired Barclays Global Investors in a deal that included Barclays’ iShares ETF business. Three years before that, the firm acquired Merrill Lynch Investment Management.
Blackrock and Scotland
Edinburgh Airport was purchased by Blackrock from Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) for 9.43 billion
Aberdeen Asset Management tracker trust merged with BlackRock Income Strategies trust (BIST).
Scottish Widows invested £2 billion in a new fund from Black Rock which is expected to support the transition to a new low-carbon economy.
Wheatley Group secured £100 million of new private investment as it drives forward Scotland’s largest house-building programme.
The debt funding deal with investment firm BlackRock Real Assets follows days after Wheatley’s financial outlook was revised upward.
In its annual review, S&P Global Ratings revised its forecast to “stable” from “negative”, while retaining Wheatley’s A+ credit rating for its £300 million public bond, issued in November 2014.
The housing, care and property management group, which owns or manages 83,000 homes, will use the debt financing to help develop around 3500 new social and mid-market rented homes.
23 Mar 2014: Scottish independence: Blackrock warned of post-Yes risks for the UK and Scotland:
The world’s biggest investment fund manager said Scottish independence would bring “major uncertainties, costs and risks”.
Blackrock’s assessment was that those risks would be “mostly for Scotland, but also for the remaining UK”.
The report comes as an academic analysis strongly disputed the UK Treasury’s rejection of a currency union post-Yes.
Blackrock said a currency union between an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK “looks infeasible” and would “bring risks to both countries”.
The asset managers believed the “best of the few choices” Scotland had would be to launch its own currency.
The company said oil and gas were critical to Scotland’s finances but fiscal spending based on specific oil revenue projections was “uncertain and probably unwise”.
It said that banks and insurers would face pressure to move headquarters to a “stronger fiscal state with a more certain regulatory backdrop”.
However, the report added: “A wholesale exodus of staff and operations would be unlikely, given Scotland’s cost advantage over London and other locations.”
Blackrock also said that fears an independent Scotland would become a “bastion of anti-business sentiment were unfounded. It said: “The Scottish government would likely go out of its way to accommodate the oil industry in particular. Why risk killing the Scottish grouse that lays the golden egg?”
It recognised the UK position that in March 2014 Scotland received a third of UK subsidies for renewable energy, although it represented less than a tenth of the UK’s population.
It also recognised the pro-independence position that Scotland would no longer need to help fund the UK’s nuclear programme. (Subsidies were slashed by Westminster not long after the referendum to fund England’s nuclear renewable energy development programme)
Blackrock’s assessment came as Leslie Young, professor of economics at a university in Beijing, claimed the Westminster Treasury’s currency position did not stand up to scrutiny.
He was commissioned by businessman Sir Tom Hunter’s new institute to assess the case against a currency union between an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK.
Sir Tom funded academic reports, research and polling in a bid to help people better understand the issues in the referendum, while he said he was undecided on his vote.
Currency view differences
A Scottish government spokesman responded to the Blackrock report by saying: “The Fiscal Commission Working Group, which comprises economic experts and including two Nobel Laureates, has considered a range of currency options in its detailed report published a year ago, and concluded that it is in the interests of both Scotland and the UK to continue to retain Sterling in a formal monetary union, and that is the policy the Scottish Government proposes.
“A currency union is in the UK’s overwhelming economic interests due to the vast contribution Scotland makes to the Sterling Area, including its valuable contribution to the UK’s balance of payments.
“Standard & Poor’s published analysis showing that Scotland has a rich and diversified economy, with wealth levels comparable to those of AAA rated countries and that Scotland would qualify for their highest economic assessment.”
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