Andrew Dismore

Labour London Assembly Member Andrew Dismore has today written to the Chairman of the US Foreign Affairs Committee, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the EU Trade Commissioner about the Mayor’s discriminatory Emirates Airline Cable Car contract.

Mr Dismore says the illegal clause within the cable car contract between Transport for London and Emirates Airline has put any company that has both done business with TfL and also in the USA in the last 2 years at risk of prosecution in America. Such companies face possible fines of up to $250,000.

The US Export Administration Act (and other laws) forbids any US based operation from doing business with any other business or organisation that has entered into a contract with an Israel boycott clause, just as TfL has done. This means that US companies or those with US operations that have traded with TfL during the last two years of the Emirates contract may face prosecution in the USA.

Since October 2011 the contract for the cable car involved a breach of US law. The Emirates Airline contract contained a clause that banned any Israeli company or individual from being involved in the operation or ownership of the cable car. Following intense pressure Transport for London and the Mayor have ordered that the clauses be renegotiated, but at the London Assembly Oversight Committee on 18^th July, TfL’s legal counsel reported that Emirates wanted to discuss what would replace it, so the issue remains live.

Mace, the logistics company which built and now maintains the Emirates cable car has significant business interests in the United States. It has five US offices, including its US headquarters in Atlanta, and has carried out work for the US Government itself, so Mace may unwittingly have broken US law and its prohibition on Israeli boycotts; as may Serco, which operates the Docklands Light Railway and has 9 offices in the USA and its headquarters in Virginia, near Washington DC.

Mr Dismore has also reported the contract to the EU Commissioner for Trade, Karel De Gucht,  as on the face of it EU trade  and competition laws have  been broken, as the contract is  clearly at odds with the EU-Israel Association agreement.

 

Labour London Assembly Member Andrew Dismore said:

“TfL has put major companies and itself at significant risk of prosecution due to this contract fiasco. The US government is very clear that businesses operating in the United States are not to be involved in a boycott of Israel and if found to be dealing with a business that is so involved, face a fine up to $250,000.

“This is what happens when the Mayor has a vanity project and does not read the contract. The offending clause is clause 1 of the contract  so it’s not even in the small print.  At last week’s Mayor’s Question Time Boris said this deal only looked suspicious to those with ‘paranoid minds’ I don’t think it’s paranoid to question why a clause was included in a contract signed by a public body like TfL, which is under the Mayor’s control, that  blacklists an entire country and its people. Discrimination is completely unacceptable in all its forms, and for the Mayor to have accepted in the formal terms of this contract such an anti-Israeli boycott in this way beggars belief.”