Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb

2nd reading
Wednesday 9th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will set out the context for the Bill and look at some of the bigger ways forward, while my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb will concentrate more on its details.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Will I?

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I am sure she will.

Unoriginally, I begin by noting that a year is a long time in politics. In January 2021, we had Second Reading of the Financial Services Bill in your Lordships’ Chamber. The noble Lord, Lord Agnew of Oulton, was on the Front Bench, proclaiming with apparent pride that the UK had

“unwavering commitment to high-quality, agile and responsive regulation”.—[Official Report, 28/1/21; col. 1810.]

I said:

“We are a major global centre of corruption. The City is an Augean stables and the Bill is clearly sparing in its distribution of shovels.”—[Official Report, 28/1/21; col. 1861.]


It is clear that Greens lead in recognising problems, with others following eventually, and we offer solutions. I have joined many others—I note the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, in particular—in calling for an end to golden visas, a long and disgraceful saga threading through Governments of three political hues that eventually, very late in the day, has finally been cut off.

The noble Lord, Lord Agnew, is no longer sitting on the Front Bench. It was the Government’s refusal to tackle another, largely unconnected corruption issue that led to his dramatic resignation. Our issue with corruption is clearly not contained to one sector, area or type. It is a pervasive UK issue.

As a nation, we are today like a guilty individual hastily pushing an illicit lover out of the window of their bedroom as the world’s media comes storming through the front door, this Bill being scanty garments hastily donned in ill order. The world, with its attention focused in particular down the road on the City of London, will clearly not be deceived about our state of disarray. According to the International Monetary Fund, as much as 5% of the world’s GDP is laundered money, and only 1% of it is ever spotted. Collectively, developing countries have lost $16.3 trillion to illicit leakages since 1980. A very significant chunk of that flows just down the road from here. The Thames is dwarfed by a far dirtier and deadlier stream of corruption, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds noted.

It is worth noting that we are here today because of President Putin. His actions forced our Government to react. We should not be reacting; we should have been proactive many years ago. As the right reverend Prelate said, we should not need this spur, yet clearly the Government are like a horse that has been baulking at the gate, not wanting to be pushed away from a lush, tasty pasture even when it has been made deadly ill by the colic of ill-gotten gains.

Colic is not a contagious disease, but our corruption is. Look at how Russia got to the state it is in today; back in the time of President Yeltsin, the guidance for reshaping the post-Soviet economy was largely handed to western lawyers, accountants and businesspeople. The Russians were told that the neoliberal market model was the way forward, and it actively encouraged what amounted to a 19th-century robber baron-dominated wild east, with what had been Soviet-era senior apparatchiks almost seamlessly switching to champions of the market. We still see some of them today, very close to home.

Of course, the oligarchs bear responsibility for their choices and actions, but so do those who encouraged and enabled them. The sicknesses of our society are many. We often talk about our productivity problem and our labour crisis, but what if the bankers, instead of serving the oligarchs, put their talents to optimising the outputs of our manufacturing? What if the accountants were tracking the movements of nutrients and micro-organisms, with the aim of producing good, healthy food? What if the lawyers were caring for our old and sick?

I am indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Sikka—I am very sorry that we will not hear from him shortly—for the figure that there are around 400,000 professionally qualified accountants in the UK. That is the highest per capita figure in the world. We have an economy that focuses on spreadsheets, not on the quality of our society. And what have we done in terms of delivering the rule of law? It is frequently claimed that we are at the centre of the camp defending it, but we have actually been leading its absolute undermining.

A book entitled Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals will be published tomorrow. It is definitely in the contest for the best-ever timed publication of a book. The author, Oliver Bullough, notes that we do not just need changes to legislation—we need changes to enforcement, as many noble Lords have noted, and to culture and politics.

In 2016, the Government estimated that the amount of corrupt money flowing into the UK had reached £100 billion a year, and Transparency International has identified at least £1 billion of suspect property bought with Russian money alone. But the flow is not just of money; of course, there has been a massive flow into the West of Russian oil and gas. The trashing of our planet and our economic and political systems are all intimately interlinked. The impoverishment of many and the destruction of our environment are linked to the benefit of the few.

I have some specific proposals and questions for the Minister. First, will the Government now reconsider their plan for freeports? Studies by the European Parliament and the Financial Action Task Force, among others, have shown that the secrecy and extraterritorial nature of freeports are a magnet for money laundering and tax evasion. These are the kind of things we are supposedly trying to act against.

Secondly, in terms of the Russian targets for these sanctions, we are talking about an opt-in system, identifying those oligarchs that are apparently close to Putin and his regime. Robert Reich, the former US Secretary of Labor and now a professor of public policy at the University of California, suggested the freezing of all offshore holdings of Russian nationals in excess of $10 million. He estimates that this would affect 10,000 to 20,000 Russians—those who, by definition, have benefited most from Putin’s rule. How about an opt-in system instead of an opt-out one?

Thirdly, due to the prod that led us to this Chamber today, we are of course focusing on Russia, but what about many other parts of the world? I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who referred to the vicious actions of the Saudi state and our friends in the Middle East and arms customers. What are we going to do to address where Saudi money is in London and where it has come from?

I also stress to the Minister that the problem is not only people in the global south or in places that speak different languages or have different cultures from our own. There are also the tech billionaires and mining magnates, with their overweening wealth, tax dodging and exploitation of their workers. Illegally acquired wealth is far from our only problem. Unexplained wealth orders are meant to tackle that, but I suggest that we also need “all too well explained” wealth orders—you might call it a wealth tax. Many noble Lords have focused on the need to fund far better the enforcement of our laws; perhaps some of the money from a wealth tax could go towards that.

I have a final, practical question. The proposed registration will apply only to property bought in England in the last 20 years, or since 2014 in Scotland. Why not look at what is concealed by previous arrangements? Is it to be considered laundered clean, rather than just more dirty washing? Maybe there is not much desire to go further back. How much of the wealth of people in a place like this has deeply corrupt origins, stolen in the colonial and post-colonial periods?

The Greens can do nothing but support this Bill, which is a small step in the right direction. You can, however, sail even a modestly scaled superyacht through the gaps in it. I thank the Minister and his colleagues for a useful briefing that focuses on the need for a second Bill as soon as possible, but we need much more, and an acknowledgement that the problem is not simply the narrow legal framework, or individuals; the problem is our system.