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U.K. rules out probe into Mittal row
By Hasan Suroor
LONDON, FEB. 11. Downing Street today ruled out an inquiry into allegations that the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, helped the Indian businessman, Lakshmi Mittal, clinch a deal with Romania last year as a favour for the steel tycoon's donation to the Labour Party.
Its tough stand came as Mr. Blair challenged his critics to produce evidence, and it emerged that they had got at least one crucial fact wrong. Contrary to their claim that Mr. Mittal's company, LNM Holdings, was not a British company and Mr. Blair had been guilty of backing a ``foreign'' competitor in return for a 1,25,000 pound party donation, officials insisted that LNM was very much a British enterprise. It was registered in the U.K. even though the bulk of its operations was overseas, mostly in the Carribean.
``There is nothing unusual in Mr. Blair supporting a British company,'' an official in the Prime Minister's office told The Hindu defending Mr. Blair's intervention on Mr. Mittal's behalf when he was negotiating for the purchase of Romania's largest steel company, Sidex, last summer. He rejected the charge that Mr. Blair had done anything wrong when he wrote to the Romanian Prime Minister, Adrian Nastase, welcoming the imminent deal. The Prime Minister, he said, routinely wrote such letters backing British companies.
Mr. Blair, who was in Africa when the controversy erupted, hit back dismissing the allegations as ``nonsense on stilts''. ``If people have got a complaint to make, let them make it,'' he said adding that the Government would continue to support British businesses in their overseas dealings. ``Government will back companies to get contracts the whole time. If we are not careful, we will be in the absurd situation where government don't have anything to do in promoting British business which would make us a pretty unique government in the world,'' he said.
The row was triggered by media reports on Sunday that Mr. Mittal, said to be Britain's richest Asian, was the latest beneficiary of the Labour Party's ``cash-for-access culture.'' It was alleged that within weeks of Mr. Mittal making a large donation to the party in June last year, Mr. Blair wrote to the Romanian Prime Minister enthusiastically backing LNM Group's multi-million pound bid for the purchase of Sidex and that soon afterwards the deal was clinched.
Critics today found themselves on the defensive as it emerged today that Mr. Mittal was not personally known to Mr. Blair, and did not belong to the Labour ``network''. ``The only times he has met Mr. Blair have been at the sort of functions to which businessmen, soap-opera stars and comedians who are regarded as the elite of Britain's Asian community are invariably invited,'' The Times said.
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