Tony Blair was on UAE payroll while Middle East envoy
Tony Blair was paid millions of pounds by an Arab state while working as Middle East envoy, emails have revealed.
The former Prime Minister has been accused of a conflict of interest after details of the payments he received were revealed in reports today.
The United Arab Emirates helped to fund Mr Blair's London office while he was carrying out work trying to solve the Israel Palestine conflict.
But at the same time, he also received millions in consultancy fees from the sovereign wealth fund of its capital, Abu Dhabi, according to The Daily Telegraph.
And both these payments - for his private work and his envoy activities - from the UAE were paid into the same company.
But the UAE's payment for his envoy work does not appear on the relevant website, despite funding from other donors being listed.
A spokeswoman for the former Labour leader said he received the money to bankroll the travel expenses of him and his staff.
Tony Blair was employed as a consultant by a sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi while he was working as Middle east envoy, new emails have revealed
But she insisted there was no conflict of interest between this and the work he did as envoy for the Office of the Quartet.
Questions have also been raised over whether any of the staff who supported his work as envoy were ever used to aid his lucrative, private work with the Gulf state.
One email seen by the newspaper shows that Nick Banner, his chief of staff in the envoy role, went to the UAE to meet Khaldoon Al Mubarak - the chief executive of the Mubadala, the sovereign wealth fund which Mr Blair later started working for.
The next month Mr Banner, a Whitehall official on loan from the Foreign Office, was in charge of arranging talks between UI Energy, the Korean oil firm the ex PM was being paid to advise, and the head of a state-run investment firm in Abu Dhabi.
Mr Blair's work for the Korean oil company later came to light.
In an email, after a delegation from UI landed in Abu Dhabi, Mr Banner wrote to a senior UAE official: 'Below are details of the UI group.
'They're very keen to meet the most senior management of IPIC [The International Petroleum Investment Company], to try to resolve the differences that appear to have risen, for understandable but I think mistaken reasons.
'Given there seems to be a mutually beneficial outcome available, Mr Blair is very grateful that Sheikh Abdullah undertook to ensure their meetings could take place.'
Mr Blair has previously insisted that his staff as envoy were 'never involved in commercial work'.
And in 2009, Rebecca Guthrie, a Foreign Office official seconded to Mr Blair's envoy office, sent bank details for Windrush Ventures, the company which channelled money for his commercial advisory work, to a UAE official.
This was days after formal Middle East talks he held with Sheikh Abdullah at the United Nations in New York.
In a separate email, sent in 2010, Jason Searancke, the financial controller of Tony Blair Associates, the umbrella organisation for Mr Blair's commercial work, emailed UAE officials seeking money for Mr Blair's 'activities as the Quartet representative'.
The Daily Telegraph said it saw details of a separate $2 million (£1.2 million) payment to Windrush from Sheikh Abdullah's office in 2011.
Tony Blair stands with Hebron Governor Hussein al-Araj (second from the left) and senior Palestinian Muslim cleric Sheikh Taysir al-Tamimi (on the right) during his visit to the West bank in 2009. As Middle East envoy he tried to help solve the Israel Palestine conflict
Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, said the disclosures appear to 'blow out of the water' his insistence that 'there was no conflict of interest' between his roles.
A spokeswoman for Mr Blair said: 'The story about conflicts of interest with his non OQR (office of quartet representative) activities was always false.
'He did no commercial work connected with the Israeli/Palestinian issue.
'The contract with Mubadala was for work unconnected with the Quartet role as was the work for UI Energy briefly in 2008 which was a Korean company.
'As has already been publicly acknowledged, the UAE have supported the work of Mr Blair over the years including his work on governance - now done solely on a not for profit basis - in countries like Colombia and Serbia.
'In addition they contributed to the costs of Mr Blair and his London based staff for the work he and they did for the Quartet role, particularly travel. None of this money went to Mr Blair personally.
'It was quite separate from the funding of the Office of the Quartet Representative in Jerusalem, which Mr Blair also raised from a range of different Governments.'
She added: 'Any emails from London based staff of Mr Blair about money would have been in connection with the support Mr Blair received for his work from the UAE.
'The Windrush account was used simply for accounting purposes. All the money received was ring fenced for that specific purpose, audited and accounted for, and held in a dedicated bank account. The procedures for ensuring this were strict and adhered to completely.'