Cherie Blair’s Mee Healthcare private healthcare is not Tony’unbridled greed
CHERIE Blair, wife to Tony Blair, wants £65m to pay for a a company running private health clinics calle Mee Healthcare The Sunday Times reports on its front page:
Cherie Blair seeks £65m for private health clinics
Blair has joined forces with an American fund manager to raise $100m from investors on both sides of the Atlantic. They plan to open their first clinic in the Olympic village in east London within months. Her involvement in private health comes a week after it emerged that her husband paid tax of just £315,000 on one of his company’s earnings of more than £12m last year. The new venture may also benefit from the health reforms being introduced by the coalition government.
The business is called Allele Fund. It’;s motto is: We will serve you with integrity in all we do.”
The bio on Cherie Blair makes only one mention of her husband:
She met Tony Blair when they worked together as trainee lawyers. The couple married in 1980 and have four children.
This all seems rather good doesn’t it? It’s about choice. And if the woman running the outfit knows the intricacies and failings of the rival firm – the NHS – then Mee Healthcare can offer the best service to the masses complaining of Mee back and Mee gip. No?
Jon Ungoed-Thomas and Kevin Dowling seems less than enthused:
The former prime minister has attracted controversy for his income since leaving office and for lucrative deals with Kuwait and Kazakhstan. He is also a highly paid adviser to JP Morgan, the American investment bank, and other large financial services companies. During his premiership, Tony Blair launched several initiatives to try to introduce similar clinics in shopping centres. Just months before he stepped down in 2007, Patricia Hewitt, then health secretary, tried but failed to get retail chains, including Tesco, Virgin and Boots, involved in healthcare.
But Cherie can succeed. And she is not Tony Blair. She never stood for public office.
John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw and a member of the Treasury select committee, said: “I’m not in favour of people making money out of the NHS, and that includes the wife of the former prime minister. It moves healthcare provision away from the most vulnerable in society, who are the people who can’t afford to pay for it and need it most.”
Good of him to make special mention of one person. Why should she not run such a company? And what have her husband’s schemes to do with her? Why is that front-page news? Why is her name the first words the Sunday Times front-page headline. Why is the second paragraph not about healthcare but about Cherie’s husband’s massive earnings, which he can squirrel away because he has not taken a peerage and had them exposed to scrutiny..?
Posted: 15th, January 2012 | In: Politicians Comments (4) | TrackBack | Permalink
