Peter Mandelson's Global Counsel collapses owing £4.6m

Peter Mandelson's former consultancy business, Global Counsel, went bust owing £4.6m – including more than £600,000 to the taxman – a report by the group's administrators reveals. The company, which provided advice to high-profile clients including Chinese-owned TikTok, US tech business Palantir and UK pharmaceutical firm GSK, collapsed into administration in February, after it lost a series of accounts over the peer's relationship with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson, who denies any wrongdoing, had resigned from the board in 2024 but continued to hold shares in the company. Global Counsel's client list received fresh scrutiny this month after it emerged Mandelson failed the UK government's enhanced vetting process before he was appointed as UK ambassador to Washington, with speculation about security concerns around his links to foreign states, including China. In a "statement of affairs" filed on Thursday at Companies House, administrators reported that the firm had liabilities totalling £4,596,149 – even after £2.7m of assets had been taken into account. The largest external creditor of the failed business is HM Revenue and Customs, which is owed £645,789 according to the document. Global Counsel, which Mandelson co-founded in 2010, had employed about 100 people, the vast majority of whom were based in the UK with the remainder in Berlin, Brussels, Doha and Singapore. These employees were collectively owed £2.6m by the business, the report added. Co-founder and Global Counsel chief executive Ben Wegg-Prosser, who was formerly Tony Blair's director of strategic communications at No 10, stepped down from the business in early February, as Global Counsel wrestled with revelations including how Mandelson had sought Epstein's advice on setting up the business in 2010. The Epstein files had also shown that Wegg-Prosser travelled to meet Epstein in New York in 2010 – two years after the latter's conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, for which he was registered as a sex offender – to discuss the business's launch. "I had the misfortune to meet Epstein on one occasion. It was a short meeting of no consequence and thankfully was never to be repeated," Wegg-Prosser has said in the past. The administrators added that while the business has assets of more than £10.7m, they are only confident of being able to realise about £2.7m.