Our politicians and businessmen were willing to suck up to Gaddafi

Friday, September 02, 2011

CAN you imagine the ructions there would be now had our Government succeeded in getting the being deposed Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gadafi to invest in the rescue of our banks late last year?

The most serious questions would have to be asked about the wisdom, ethics and morals of allowing the regime of a murderous dictator to become involved in providing finance to dig our banks out of the deep hole in which they reside.

But apparently that’s exactly what representatives of this state tried to achieve. In February this year The Sunday Times reported that our National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) had attempted to secure a multibillion-euro investment for our main banks, AIB and Bank of Ireland, from Gaddafi’s international investment fund and did so in the first week of December last year. It even reported that Brian Lenihan, finance minister at the time, was aware of the negotiations that ensued.

One of the humiliating outcomes of it all was that the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), which controls assets worth more than €46.9 billion, and which was run effectively for the benefit of Gaddafi and his family, decided the Irish banks were too small and troublesome to be bothered with. They were afraid too that so distressed are the Irish banks that the acquisition of shares could have led to Libya taking control of our banks, leading to regulatory issues and some unwanted attention. It didn’t matter that we have long enjoyed a good commercial relationship with this country: last year more than 23% of the oil consumed in Ireland came from the north African nation — LIA has been a buyer previously of Irish gilts and historically they bought much of our beef exports. They simply didn’t want to know. Thankfully.

Imagine had they bought our banks though. How would it have been explained? Remarkably Libya had been rehabilitated in recent years, so much so that Gaddafi had addressed the United Nations in New York in 2009.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair made two references to Gaddafi in his memoir A Journey and both of them are favourable. Blair argued that the invasion of Iraq might not have happened if Saddam Hussein had reacted as "openly and transparently" as Gaddafi did to demands to prove that he did not hold weapons of mass destruction. He said this once in the book and then re-emphasises the point later in the book by wishing that Saddam, like Gaddafi, "had really changed".

Unfortunately, the book does not make further references to his soft-soaping of Gaddafi, a man who had killed hundreds on British soil when his agents exploded an airplane over Lockerbie in Scotland, supplied the IRA with the weapons to bomb and kill in Northern Ireland and Britain, and whose embassy staff were responsible for the murder of a British policewoman in London nearly 30 years. Blair went to the Libyan desert to take tea with Gaddafi, apparently buoyed by his belief that if he could reason and talk with terrorists in Ireland he could do the same in Libya .

Whatever about what happened here in Ireland he was played for a fool by Gaddafi. The manner in which Gaddafi fought to suppress the legitimate and popular uprising of his people in recent months emphasised that he was anything but changed and that you don’t need weapons of mass destruction to suppress your citizens.

His playing of the western world was facilitated in particular by his use of paid for public relations experts who placed stories in the western world’s media to reinforce the notion that Gaddafi was reformed. A British public relations firm, run by a friend of Peter Mandelson, the former senior adviser to Blair and then a European Commissioner who had urged the EU to enter a trade deal with Libya, and who as a British minister signed a deal for British universities to be twinned with their Libyan counterparts, was one of those used to create an entirely false public perception of a changed Gaddafi.

Again it was the Sunday Times that disclosed how this company called Brown Lloyd James (BLJ) had been paid to claim Gaddafi was a "fascinating contemporary world figure" and promoted the idea that his son, Saif, was a human rights champion, a particularly despicable invention given what is known about him now.

The London School of Economics in particular was duped, allowing a live video address to it by Gaddafi as recently as last December — about the time the NTMA was seeking Libyan money — in which the dictator described Blair as a friend. That the LSE allowed this may be explained by a pledge of a stg£1.5m donation in June 2009 and the payment of a similar sum to run a so-called "future leadership" programme for the Libyan elite.

The chairman of the LSE’s ruling council — which approved the Gaddafi donation — is the prominent Irishman Peter Sutherland. He was then the non-executive chairman of oil exploration giant BP when he visited Libya with Blair in May 2007. The oil company signed a stg£450m exploration deal at the time. Business interests as much as encouraging democratic engagement may explain the desire to get Gaddafi onside in those days. And if major multi-nationals saw him as a good person to do business with, as well as British prime ministers, then it is easy to see why the NTMA would have picked Gaddafi as a potential investor for our banks.

THE hullabaloo over football pundit Tony Cascarino’s use of the word "holocaust" to describe the performance of an Arsenal player during television coverage of that team’s 8-2 defeat by Manchester United last Sunday has been extraordinary.

Tony — who I’ve worked with over the last eight years on radio and in recent years on television — is someone whom I have come to like a lot. There are times when he says the unexpected, sometimes picking words I wouldn’t have, but that happens to lots of people on live radio and television when you don’t have time to be silent or to consider what to say when you are being pressed for something to say.

Many Sky Sports viewers apparently were deeply offended by his use of a word that is associated often with the mass murder of Jewish people in the genocide by Nazi regime of the middle of the last century. They may have been influenced by the almost immediate apology given by Sky in anticipation of complaints. It must have given many people the reason to believe that great offence had been offered.

I checked the dictionary and "holocaust" means "great destruction" or "loss of life" or "the source of such destruction". While clearly the Arsenal defender was not in danger of dying he was, in football parlance, "being destroyed". He said something that at worst was a bit unwise because it was at risk of being misinterpreted but nothing more than that.

Cascarino was dropped from Sky’s Wednesday night coverage of that day’s transfer deadline but hopefully will be restored for future coverage. If he’s not it’s because of a mob mentality that contrives outrage and seeks offence when none is meant. It is nowhere near as objectionable as kissing the ass of Gaddafi, as so many lauded politicians and businessmen did.

*The Last Word with Matt Cooper is broadcast on 100-102 Today FM, Monday to Friday 4.30pm to 7pm

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Friday, September 02, 2011