Just how a lot has David Cameron been making within the Middle East?

Billed because the world’s most luxurious and costly resort, the Dubai Armani occupies a number of storeys within the Burj Khalifa skyscraper — at 2,722ft, the world’s tallest constructing.

The first resort to be designed by the style guru Giorgio Armani, its marble flooring and zebrawood panels do not come low-cost: the best suites price as much as £8,000 an evening.

In June, the resort performed host to former Prime Minister David Cameron — now, after all, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton and the overseas secretary. Back then, when he was the headline speaker on the Arabian Business Leadership Summit, Cameron was only a 57-year-old ex-politician making an attempt to forge a job for himself after his repute crashed and burned over the Greensill lobbying scandal.

Just a few weeks earlier than the summit, Cameron launched an effusive assertion.

‘I very a lot look ahead to sharing my very own ideas and experiences with enterprise leaders from throughout the area in June, and to returning to the UAE — a rustic I’ve spent appreciable time in earlier than,’ he wrote. After his speech, which was given behind closed doorways and for which he was paid a reputed payment of £120,000, Cameron hosted a non-public lunch.

Guests included Jerry Inzerillo, chief govt of Saudi Arabia‘s Diriyah Gate Development Authority, whose chairman is none aside from Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, extensively known as MBS.

Six months earlier than the speech, a U.S. court docket had mentioned there have been ‘credible allegations’ MBS was concerned within the 2018 homicide of the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The killing happened in Saudi’s Istanbul consulate, the place Khashoggi was dismembered with a bone noticed.

Cameron was again in Dubai as lately as September, talking at an ‘unique, closed-door discussion board’, earlier than heading for a second convention in Abu Dhabi on strengthening ties between the UAE and the Port City Colombo growth in Sri Lanka. This huge challenge is being funded by the Chinese authorities, which has already invested $1.4 billion within the scheme, resulting from be accomplished by 2041 as a part of the nation’s dedication to put money into strategic infrastructure, initiatives abroad and enhance its affect the world over.

Though his enthusiasm for the Beijing-funded scheme is evident — he’s quoted on the event web site saying that it is going to be a ‘sea of alternative’ that may assist in ‘bringing higher prosperity for all’ — Cameron has been at pains to clarify that he was employed by a U.S. audio system company for the occasion.

And, certainly, that is what the much-anticipated register about his enterprise dealings printed this week by the impartial adviser on ministers’ pursuits, Sir Laurie Magnus, disclosed.

It mentioned he was on the books of the Washington Speakers Bureau, alongside a listing of educational and charitable roles that he’s concerned in. The register added that his monetary pursuits have been in a ‘blind belief/blind administration association’ which means he has no information of the place his property are being invested, and that he was the ‘potential beneficiary of a household belief with no oversight’ of it.

But the absence of any additional details about who he has been working for earlier than being appointed Foreign Secretary has led to accusations of a cover-up.

‘The public deserves to know the complete record of Cameron’s shoppers and any potential battle of curiosity [with his role as Foreign Secretary],’ demanded Liberal Democrat chief whip Wendy Chamberlain.

It is, maybe, a pertinent level. These days, Cameron is being paid lower than he has turn into accustomed to: a mere £104,000 a yr as the primary Foreign Secretary to function from the House of Lords since Lord Carrington, who resigned in 1982 in the course of the Falklands disaster.

And but there are worryingly few solutions as to what, exactly, Cameron has been doing to earn his residing for the reason that final common election.

The data of The Office Of David Cameron, the enterprise he arrange after he left Parliament in 2016, shed little mild.

In 2019, the agency reported a formidable revenue of £836,168 — however Cameron subsequently turned the outfit into an ‘limitless firm’ and it not has to publish monetary statements. Cameron has suspended all his enterprise exercise since his shock appointment in Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet reshuffle earlier this month.

But the query stays: may the dearth of transparency over the extent of his monetary hyperlinks — or lack of them — with Middle East regimes equivalent to within the UAE undermine his potential to do his job dispassionately because the Government’s diplomat-in-chief?

Even if he hasn’t made a penny from these repeated journeys — or any cash he has been paid has come from non-Middle Eastern sources — it is clear that he has a profound curiosity within the area.

After all, Cameron’s connections to the UAE return a great distance. In February 2017, lower than a yr after he give up politics, he was the star flip on the Dubai Diamond Conference.

The viewers was restricted to an elite of African authorities ministers, diamond merchants, financiers and jewellers. At Cameron’s insistence, all media besides reporters from diamond commerce magazines have been faraway from the convention corridor earlier than he was launched to talk.

He was again within the UAE in February 2018 for the Global Financial Markets Forum in Abu Dhabi. Speakers there included Khaldoon Al Mubarak, chief govt officer of Mubadala, the nation’s sovereign wealth fund, whose sole shareholder is the federal government of Abu Dhabi. Al Mubarak is a person with fingers in all kinds of pies.

As effectively as being a private adviser to the UAE’s President, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, he has — since 2018 — been the nation’s particular envoy to China. (Cameron himself as soon as hung out making an attempt and failing to launch a brand new UK-China funding fund.)

And so it was no shock when, in January this yr, Cameron took a three-week lecturer’s publish on the Abu Dhabi campus of the University Of New York (NYU), an establishment that boasts Al Mubarak — a key determine within the UAE authorities — on its board of trustees.

Cameron lectured college students on ‘practising politics and authorities within the age of disruption’. But even this posting aroused controversy.

Academics have questioned the flexibility of NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus to function with the identical degree of freedom it enjoys in America.

After all, the UAE is an authoritarian state that has cracked down strongly on freedom of expression for the reason that pro-democracy uprisings in the course of the Arab Spring of 2011.

Some college employees have been barred from getting into the nation as a result of they’d criticised its autocratic rulers. Numerous tutorial books have been censored.

Unlike fellow ex-PMs Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Theresa May — who retains her seat within the Commons — Cameron has hardly ever put his head above the political parapet since leaving workplace. Which explains why there was such shock in Westminster this autumn when he returned to the frontline after seven chequered years within the wilderness.

And his appointment as Foreign Secretary was all of the extra exceptional, maybe, on condition that Cameron was a central determine in one of many largest lobbying scandals of current years.

In his position as a marketing consultant to Greensill Capital, he used his private connections with former colleagues, equivalent to then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak, to attempt to change the UK’s guidelines on Covid-19 ‘banking loans’, a job that paid him a reputed £7million over three years.

The whiff of scandal was all of the stronger as a result of, in a extremely uncommon gesture for a first-rate minister, it emerged that Cameron had given Lex Greensill, an Australian financier, a desk within the Cabinet Office in 2012. Then, when he left No 10, Greensill successfully turned his boss.

Greensill’s collapse in 2021 led to felony investigations which are ongoing within the UK, Germany and Switzerland. Although Cameron isn’t implicated within the inquiries, he stood to make tens of hundreds of thousands of kilos from Greensill share choices earlier than the corporate’s failure rendered them nugatory.

After Cameron’s lobbying got here to mild — he had despatched no fewer than 56 texts to ministers and civil servants — it emerged he had additionally maintained a detailed relationship with Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman after he left workplace. With Greensill in tow, Cameron met MBS quickly after the so-called Davos In The Desert summit in Riyadh in 2019, which Cameron had attended, only a yr after the brutal homicide of Jamal Khashoggi.

This encounter was all of the extra controversial as a result of, upfront of the assembly, Cameron exploited his political connections to be given a confidential briefing from 10 Downing Street on the Saudis’ financial and political place.Emails disclosed below Freedom Of Information guidelines to the marketing campaign group Spotlight On Corruption present that Cameron contacted the overseas coverage adviser of his personal successor Theresa May for strategic recommendation.

His workplace mentioned the go to to Saudi Arabia was to advise the nation’s rulers on internet hosting the G20 summit in 2020. More intriguingly nonetheless, the correspondence between No 10 and Cameron’s employees present they didn’t disclose for a full week that he was going to Saudi with Greensill, his most important monetary benefactor.

George Havenhand, senior authorized adviser to Spotlight On Corruption, mentioned: ‘Cameron’s request for delicate briefings, with out explaining his plan to assist his boss schmooze with the Crown Prince, was at finest an absence of judgment and at worst an abuse of the appreciable affect he had as a former prime minister. The means that Cameron blurred his personal pursuits with the UK’s nationwide pursuits is profoundly regarding and raises questions on his actions in different nations.

‘The veil of secrecy he has drawn over his monetary affairs shuts down correct scrutiny. Unless there may be full transparency about Cameron’s money-making schemes earlier than he returned to workplace, the general public shall be left questioning the place his priorities actually lie.’

With Abu Dhabi’s bid for the Telegraph newspaper group now occupying a outstanding place within the authorities’s in-tray, it is a query that has by no means been extra related.

Earlier this yr, Lloyds Banking Group ordered the sale of the paper by means of a proper public sale course of. But the public sale was then halted after the Telegraph’s homeowners, the Barclay household, did a take care of Abu Dhabi-funded RedBird IMI permitting them to repay £1.2 billion price of debt to Lloyds.

Having taken on the debt, RedBird plans to transform it into possession of the titles. This could be massively contentious, since it could successfully place certainly one of Britain’s most influential information publishers below the management of an undemocratic overseas state. The deal is now being held up after Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer ordered a public curiosity investigation.

All of which makes the necessity for transparency concerning the new Foreign Secretary’s previous involvement with Abu Dhabi extra pressing, say critics. One senior Tory — a minister within the Cameron authorities — mentioned: ‘We know why he is accepted this job within the House of Lords. His repute was shot to items after lobbying for Greensill.

‘It was at finest unseemly, at worst ill-judged, for a former prime minister to be sending textual content messages to Cabinet ministers together with the now-current Prime Minister to foyer for monetary help for his de facto employer.

‘In the previous yr, Cameron’s speeches on the worldwide lecture circuit have been drying up. He was trying washed-up on the age of 57.

‘He sees that Tony Blair is again as a senior adviser to Keir Starmer, and he is making an attempt to do the identical with Sunak. But he is introduced an terrible lot of bags with him into the Foreign Office. The questions over his Middle East hyperlinks. Why, by his personal admission, has he spent a lot time within the UAE? Was he lobbying for Greensill?

‘Then there are his hyperlinks to the Saudis with their inquiries to reply over human rights and the homicide of Khashoggi.

The Mail requested the Foreign Office why Cameron has spent a lot time within the UAE. We additionally requested whether or not he had ever been paid by the UAE authorities, whether or not he took Lex Greensill to satisfy the nation’s leaders as he had in Saudi Arabia. Was he lobbying for Greensill within the Middle East? And why wasn’t Downing Street instantly informed Greensill was accompanying him to Saudi Arabia to satisfy the Crown Prince?

Tonight, we’re nonetheless ready for solutions.