Relationship with Russia and China

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Thursday 24th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing this important debate. His timing could not have been better.

It is clear from today’s events that we live no longer in an era of change but in a change of era. That has three significant implications for our strategy on Russia and China, which is why the hon. Gentleman’s timing today is so fortunate. The three shifts entail a worldview different from that of UK policy makers, and they require a shift in our defensive strategy and a renaissance in creative diplomatic strategy whereby, quite simply, we in this country need to build a new rules-based order for the new silk road.

Let me start with the new worldview that is going to be needed. I generally try to avoid a Manichean view of the world as divided into black and white, because the world is more complicated than that, but the truth is that, from Kaliningrad through to Kamchatka, we are now witness to the creation of an enormous kleptosphere. Inside the borders of that kleptosphere, the merciless logic is that might is right: in the old phrase, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. We have to be the guardians of what we might call the “canon-osphere”—the space around the world where there are rules, there is the rule of law and there is justice.

Just as we once rid the world of piracy and slave trading, we now have to be the place that leads the charge against economic crime, no matter where that crime is perpetrated. We have to be the guardians of the new rules-based order for this simple reason: if we think the scale of global corruption today is bad, we must think for a moment about the world that is to come. The World Bank estimates that the value of natural resources in countries with bad corruption scores is $65 trillion. Imagine the world of the future, in which those natural resources are extracted and the profits go to some of the worst people on earth. That is why there is now an urgency for a very different kind of philosophy to guide our foreign policy. We have to be the place, the country, the leader that seeks a world of not simply free trade but clean trade. That must be one of the defining features of our foreign policy for the years to come.

The second dimension is that we obviously need new defences. We in this House have to confront the reality that our strategy of deterrence has failed. Most of us who spoke in the debate on the economic sanctions were profoundly disappointed with the weakness of the package proposed. Frankly, many of us feel that the Prime Minister was a little late to the party. “Too little, too late” will be written on his political gravestone, I fear. None the less, we must now accept that the threat of sanctions has failed and we must now offer President Putin the iron fist. That has to take aim at Russia’s key strategic weakness, which is its 20 km border.

We must now envisage a different security environment along the Russian border. That means that we should have proactive talks with Finland and Sweden about how they partner with NATO; it means further reinforcing our presence in the Baltics; it means new kinds of conversations at the other end of the border, in Georgia; it means thinking about how we take on and equip those fighting the insurgencies in places such as South Ossetia and Transnistria; and it means that we have to take a completely different approach to the Balkans, and step up and accelerate the path towards NATO membership for Bosnia-Herzegovina.

We now have to start to roll NATO forward in strength across the border, so that President Putin’s tactical advance results in what is ultimately a strategic defeat. I am afraid part and parcel of that is that we will have to consider the deployment of intermediate ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe. The truth is that the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty broke down because President Putin was breaking the rules and deploying SSC-8 missiles, which were prohibited by that treaty. Russia has built very effective anti-access and area-denial systems that safeguard it against air and naval attack. A defence against ground-launched cruise missiles is much more difficult. The Secretary-General of NATO has been right to rule out arming those missiles with nuclear warheads, but we must now think more aggressively about our defence posture, given the security threat President Putin now poses to this great homeland of Europe.

The final point I wish to make clear is that it is time for British grand strategy to go through something of a renaissance. This is not an original point of mine but something that people such as Lord Ricketts have been writing about for some time. If we look back over history, we see so many examples of how, when Russian and Chinese leaders feel strong at home, they advance into the periphery—into the borderland. That was true under Tsar Nicholas and under the Qing empire, and it is true today. That means that a corridor of chaos is potentially going to stretch from the Baltic to Ukraine, down through Syria and Iran, through Kashmir, into Myanmar, into North Korea and into the South China sea.

We have not only to think creatively and imaginatively about how we provide a security environment for that space but to think anew about creating a Marshall plan for that space, just as we did in Europe after world war two. Then, we created the OECD to foster Europe’s economic development; we now need to do the same for the silk road. The passage to India, the Pacific and beyond now needs a British-led institution that looks imaginatively at how we create new infrastructure. China will be spending something like $1.5 trillion on infrastructure across this great border zone. What are we spending? We do not know, but we could be using our skills to identify the infrastructure priorities in places such as Pakistan. We could be thinking imaginatively about how we mobilise infrastructure finance. London has been the home of infrastructure finance since we defeated Napoleon and Nathan Rothschild created the international bond market in London.

We have the wherewithal to mobilise sovereign wealth funds, which are growing radically and quickly in places such as the Gulf, and deploying that money in good strong contracts, with good strong standards, that avoid the kind of mistakes that we saw in the early days of the Qatari world cup stadium-building programme. We could be a force for good in building infrastructure, in financing infrastructure, and in making sure that there are good rules around that.

We could be thinking imaginatively about how we create free trade across this zone. We could be thinking imaginatively about how we settle disputes. We could be thinking imaginatively about the legal services and the consulting services that we offer out of London into this space. The reality is that, by 2050, the economies of the new silk road will be worth two and a half times the value of the economies on the Atlantic seaboard. The economic centre of gravity is moving east. This is possibly where I differ from the hon. Member for Isle of Wight. In my view, we need to think imaginatively about offering the welcoming hand of trade as well as offering a strong shield and a strong sword.

I will finish with a quote from Dean Acheson, the US Secretary of State after world war two, who famously boasted that he was present at the creation. He warned us that

“the future comes one day at a time.”

We now do not have a single day to waste. That is why this debate is so very important.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Countering Russian Aggression and Tackling Illicit Finance

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Amanda Milling]

Let me just finish this point. There are people of Russian origin in this country who are British citizens. Many are critics of Putin, and it is completely wrong and discriminatory to tar them with the same brush.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I am sorry that the Minister has to defend the indefensible. Will she confirm to the House today whether the vetting of Mohamed Amersi’s donation surfaced the news that he made $4 million in a business deal with a man who was President Putin’s telecoms minister? Did the vetting cover that—yes or no?

[Amanda Milling]

As I say, donations to the Conservative party are received in good faith. They receive appropriate due diligence, are from permissible sources, are properly and transparently declared to and published by the Electoral Commission, and comply with the law.

--- Later in debate ---

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I congratulate Labour Front Benchers on calling this debate, because we are required to come together today to discuss, to expose and to unravel what could be the greatest coincidence in British politics. The cynical would say, in the words of Yogi Berra, that it is almost too coincidental to be a coincidence, although of course this House would not hazard such a judgment, but here it is: on the one hand we have a Government who have presided over the most comprehensive failure to tackle economic crime, which is a failure so profound that we have earned a reputation around the world as one of the world’s capitals of money laundering, yet on the other hand we have a flood-tide of money—not £2 million, not £3 million but over £4 million, and counting—that has come into Tory party coffers from generous souls with close ties to Russia. The ministerial code, for what it is worth, says that Ministers are required not only to avoid a conflict of interest but to avoid an appearance of a conflict of interest.

I therefore speak today in a spirit of great generosity to the Minister, because I want to try to extract him from the pickle that he now finds himself in. I am seriously concerned that Tory Ministers are now exposed to the allegation that they are quite simply poodles on roubles. In that spirit of generosity, I want to set out the two problems that the Minister will be required to resolve if he is to escape such an appearance over the weeks, months and years to come. Problem No. 1 is the gaping hole where a plan for tackling economic crime should be. We know the scale of the problem because the National Crime Agency has told us. It says that the scale of economic crime is some £100 billion a year in money laundering and £190 billion lost to fraud—a total of £290 billion. That is a significant chunk of our nation’s GDP, so this is not an insignificant problem: it is a monumental problem over which the Government are presiding. Secondly, the reputational damage is so serious that think-tanks in Washington are writing reports saying things like:

“uprooting Kremlin-linked oligarchs will be a challenge given the close ties between Russian money and the United Kingdom’s ruling Conservative Party”.

How on earth has the Conservative party got itself into this mess? Well, it is quite a story. I am going to rattle through the 10 key steps that have led the Government to get into this mess. First, they abolished the Minister in charge of economic crime. When the Minister was appointed—[Interruption.] Well, he was appointed with the title of Minister for Security and Borders, whereas his predecessor was known as the Minister for Security and Economic Crime. So the Government are taking economic crime so seriously that they deleted it from the title of the Minister who has been asked to wind up this debate.

Secondly, the Government have now tasked not one, not two but 12 different agencies with tackling the problem of economic crime without going to the trouble of appointing someone to be in charge of these 12 different agencies so as to lead the charge. Thirdly, they have neglected to implement 60% of the measures in their own economic crime plan. Going through the list of measures rated “red” by the Royal United Services Institute, some of them are pretty significant, such as making sure that the police get serious about tackling fraud and economic crime.

Next, the Government have starved the National Crime Agency of so many resources that its director general says that it will not take on cases where it thinks the legal costs will be too high. Then they have failed to equip Companies House with the powers to check information sent in by people setting up shell companies. According to the Minister, there are now 11,000 companies on the register that still have not filed returns on who is the person with significant control, yet how many prosecutions have we had? One hundred and nineteen. It is pathetic; it is lamentable. Then they have failed to bring forward a register of beneficial ownership of property, like the multi-million-pound mansions in Westminster. Then they have failed to use our unique role in the global financial economy to light up where bad actors are doing bad things. SWIFT, the financial messaging system, is based in the UK. We are the global hub, along with New York, of financial settlement worldwide. We could be using the panorama of information to which we have access to light up bad people, to create intelligence packages and then to ensure that those people are pursued to the ends of the earth.

We have failed to stop our courts being used as arenas to silence journalists such as Catherine Belton and Tom Burgis, who are pursuing bad and corrupt companies. Thank God for HarperCollins and Arabella Pike because, frankly, without such brave publishing houses, we would not have the truth brought into the public domain. Then we have the Government’s failure to introduce a foreign agents registration Act, despite the fact that it works in America and Australia. To cap it all, they have failed to offer us any kind of hard timetable for the economic crime Bill, which is an omission so serious that they lost their own Minister to it in the House of Lords.

Those 10 elements—this 10-step decent into chaos—is why we now have a situation where the grand total of unexplained wealth orders targeted against oligarchs is zero. Apart from the Magnitsky sanctions, which came from a list of the crimes handed to us in 2007, we have not proposed any sanctions for economic crime against Russian-born individuals since 2014. Some might say that is benign neglect; others might say it is malign neglect; and others might say that the Conservative party has been paid to look the other way.

I am sure we were all reassured by the Secretary of State for Instagram’s appearance on “BBC Breakfast” this morning, where she—the Foreign Secretary—told a grateful nation that the Tory party vets its donors and that we must not confuse Russian heritage with proximity to President Putin. I think we would all agree with that, which is why, in the spirit of generosity and helpfulness, I offer my vetting services to those on the Conservative Front Bench this afternoon.

Let us start with Lubov Chernukhin, who has donated £2.1 million. The Guardian revealed that her husband, Vladimir, who was appointed deputy chairman of VEB, which was not sanctioned yesterday, received $8 million from Suleiman Kerimov, who was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2018. The transfer to Vladimir came on 29 April 2016, mysteriously just before a donation of £1.5 million to the Conservative party. Then there is Alexander Temerko, a man who, it is said,

“forged a career at the top of the Russian arms industry and had connections at the highest levels of the Kremlin”.

He was a former deputy chairman of Yukos Oil Company and somehow mysteriously escaped the purge of his colleagues. He has now donated £747,000. He has been working very closely with Viktor Fedotov, a director of Aquind, a source of great largesse to many Members in the House. Mr Fedotov is the former head of a subsidiary of Lukoil, and was revealed in the Pandora papers as a man who, along with two others

“made fortunes from the company in the mid-2000s, around the time it was alleged to have been siphoning funds from the Russian state pipeline monopoly Transneft.”

Then we have Dmitry Leus, who has donated £54,000. According to the Daily Mail, he was

“found guilty of money laundering and jailed in Russia in 2004. The conviction was later overturned and he insists the prosecution was politically motivated.”

Here is the mystery: he also donated to the Prince’s Foundation, which has decided to return Mr Leus’s money. The House will be amazed to hear that the Conservative party has not.

Then we have Mohammed Amersi. He and his wife have given £793,000 to the Conservative party. The BBC said he was involved in one of Europe’s biggest corruption scandals, which entailed $220 million being paid to a Gibraltar-based company owned by the daughter of the President of Uzbekistan. He has always insisted that his donations came from UK profits, but the Financial Times tells us that he

“received $4m from a company he knew to be secretly owned by a powerful Russian”—

Putin’s then telecoms Minister.

Then we have Murtaza Lakhani, whose firm Mercantile & Maritime has donated £500,000. This is the chap who Bloomberg tells us has been revealed as making large parts of his fortune through channelling

“a $6 billion torrent of cash”

from the Russian oil giant Rosneft to Kurdistan. The money flowed to a company registered in the tax haven of Belize, with a mailing address in Cyprus.

Then we have David Burnside, formerly of this parish. His firm has donated £200,000. Mr Burnside boasts links to senior figures in the Kremlin. The Guardian reported that he

“has introduced several prominent Kremlin figures to senior Conservatives”,

including Mr Putin’s old friend, Vasily Shestakov.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I note that the right hon. Gentleman has a long list. I wonder whether he could just deliver it a little bit faster.

[Liam Byrne]

I will conclude, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I think my vetting services have been exhausted for the Front Bench. I will conclude by saying that Conservative Ministers are behaving like innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent. No wonder people are now saying that the capital of Londongrad is not Mayfair but Matthew Parker Street, home of Conservative central office. The cruel would say it is 5 Hertford Street, co-owned by Jamie Reuben, scion of the family that made its fortune in the Russian aluminium wars and, as we know, the place where the Foreign Secretary insists on her £3,000 lunches.

The Government have to work harder to persuade us that there is not a coincidence. They have to persuade us that they are not poodles on roubles. They have to bring forward a proper plan for tackling economic crime, not least because of the fact that the financial services industry is worth £165 billion to this country, and it employs millions of people who work hard every day. But we trade on our reputation, and right now, this Government are destroying that reputation for good.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Security and Borders (Damian Hinds)]

I welcome this important debate. I thank the Opposition for securing it, and I am grateful for the manner in which the shadow Foreign Secretary opened it, the manner in which the shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury closed it, and the tone in which it has largely, if not quite completely, been conducted.

Of course Government must be scrutinised and must be held to account. In our oppositional parliamentary liberal democracy, that is what we do, and I think it is what this House does rather well. But is also a great strength of this House that we can come together to show the unity of our ultimate purpose—the defence of freedom and democracy at home and abroad—and I believe that, collectively, we have done that today.

In his statement yesterday, the Prime Minister was clear. In recognising the supposed independence of the so-called people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, President Putin has flagrantly violated international law. Ukraine is a sovereign country, and has a right to choose its own security arrangements. It is clear that the deployment of Russian forces in sovereign Ukrainian territory amounts to a renewed invasion of the country. The Prime Minister referred yesterday to “our valiant Ukrainian friends”, and added:

“We will keep faith with them in the critical days that lie ahead, and whatever happens, Britain will not waver in our resolve.”—[Official Report, 22 February 2022; Vol. 709, c. 175.]

The United Kingdom also has an absolute commitment to defend our NATO allies. We have already doubled the size of our deployment in Estonia, where the British Army leads the NATO battlegroup.

Yesterday the UK, in co-ordination with international partners, announced a first wave of targeted sanctions. I say a first wave, but in fact more than 270 individuals are already sanctioned under previous programmes. Yesterday’s measures placed banks worth £37 billion under sanctions, in addition to more oligarchs, and there is more to come. My hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) rightly mentioned the importance of calibration. It is also vital that after this first barrage we continue to work in lockstep with our friends and allies around the world, as my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger) rightly pointed out. These measures will hit more oligarchs and banks close to the Kremlin, sending a clear message that the UK will use our economic heft to inflict pain on the Putin regime and degrade its strategic interests.

The UK will also sanction those members of the Duma and the Federation Council who voted to recognise the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, violating Ukraine’s territory. We will extend the territorial sanctions imposed on Crimea to non-Government controlled territory in the so-called breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, and we are ready to go much further if Russia does not pull back from the brink. In the event of further aggressive acts against Ukraine from Russia, we have an unprecedented package of further sanctions ready to go. I will not, from the Dispatch Box, go into future designations or who we will target and with what measure, but Moscow should be clear that we will use these powers to maximum effect if Russia further invades Ukraine.

Corruption and illicit finance are the lifeblood of the kleptocratic Russian Government, and individuals associated with the Russian state can try to further their influence through investment. This Government are strongly committed to tackling—and we continue to act against—the threat from illicit finance. Through the economic crime plan launched in 2019, we are overhauling our suspicious activity reports framework against money laundering, including from Russia. We are increasing the number of financial investigators in the National Crime Agency, and we are substantially increasing funding for our economic crime response, with an additional £400 million over the next three years, funded in part by a new economic crime levy.

[Liam Byrne]

I want to clarify one point. The Minister seemed to imply that further sanctions would be contingent on a further roll-forward of Russian troops, but that is not what the Minister for Europe and North America, the right hon. Member for Braintree (James Cleverly) said to the House yesterday. He said that there would be further sanctions regardless of whether there was any further advance. Can the Minister clarify that point?

[Damian Hinds]

We will work together in lockstep with our friends and allies around the world. I will not go into detail now about what future designations might be or the precise nature of them, but as I said earlier, Moscow should know that we will use these measures to their full effect.

Sanctions

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

May I follow up the question that was well posed by the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) earlier? On the package of sanctions announced today, what specifically is that designed to deter, and what is the ultimatum that is being sent to the Russian Government today?

[James Cleverly]

I will come to more details of the sanctions package and what we hope to achieve with it, but ultimately we are looking to prevent further territorial encroachment and aggression into Ukraine, and to get Russian troops to withdraw back to Russia, to de-escalate and to move away from the Ukrainian border. As I will say later in my speech, if the House gives me the opportunity to progress, we are working and co-ordinating closely with our international partners in our sanctions response to ensure maximum effectiveness.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Lammy]

My right hon. Friend is exactly right: it could, but it needs enforcement and we need to hear more individuals named. The danger in this debate is that the punishment does not befit the crime. I understand the Government’s desire to maintain a broader deterrent against further escalation, but it is also clear that a threshold has been crossed. The gravity of Putin’s actions requires a broader, firmer and fuller response, otherwise we risk his calculating that the rewards of aggression outweigh the costs.

[Liam Byrne]

My right hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech. When the new sanctioning regime was introduced, it was all about increasing our capacity to act independently to sanction bad actors. Is my right hon. Friend therefore disappointed that, Magnitsky sanctions aside, we have added only three people to the sanctions list for economic crimes since 2014? That seems pathetic, given the threat we confront.

[Mr Lammy]

My right hon. Friend is exactly right. In this city of more than 7 million people, with at least a quarter of a million properties owned in London by foreign nationals, just three individuals have been named, when the EU has already indicated the naming of 27.

--- Later in debate ---

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow that excellent speech.

There is an old saying that no matter how elegant the strategy one should occasionally look at the results. The truth is that this Government threatened sanctions as a deterrent and the invasion proceeded, and this afternoon they have laid out the first of their concrete sanctions and the invasion has just stepped up. So surely the Government have got to recognise that the strategy they have laid out of deterrence has failed and they therefore need to think again and come back to this House with measures that are strong and Russia-stopping, because that is not what we have got today.

What has been so helpful about today’s debate is the wide acknowledgement in all parts of the House that we are now facing an adversary in Russia that has got to be stopped. This is a country that fights us in cyber-space and on the streets of Salisbury. It is a country that meddles in elections and cheats in winning medals. It is reckless in space. It shells its neighbours. Its ambitions are limitless and its tactics are merciless. The question we have to confront is: how much longer are we prepared to tolerate the intolerable?

President Putin is not hellbent on acquiring some kind of Lebensraum. His argument is not about trying to roll forward his borders to create some living space for the Russian people. If anything, his strategy, stated as it is, is more ominous: it is to restore the gory glory of the former Soviet Union and re-imperialise the borderlands across 10,000 km of Russia’s borders. That is not a secret, but we have to stop it. We have to work with our allies to put in place a regime that is going to stop this aggression now and once and for all.

That is why the package announced today is so disappointing. It has been revealing that almost no one in the House today has stood up to commend the package as good enough. Everything we have heard today has said that it is a disappointing package that falls well short of what we think is needed to deter President Putin. It is, as the old saying goes, like being savaged by a dead sheep.

The Government are not short of tools. Actually, after 9/11, one of the great legacies that Labour left was in transforming the architecture for deploying economic sanctions to deter and pursue bad people. However, as Lord Ricketts said in his excellent book late last year, it is no good having the tools if they are left in the shed. The problem we have with the Government today is that the tools are being left in the shed.

Let us look at a simple scorecard of some of the results. As the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) said, how many unexplained wealth orders have been implemented against friends of President Putin? A grand total of zero. Apart from the Magnitsky sanctions, which were handed to us and relate to a crime back in 2007, how many sanctions against individuals guilty of economic crime have we proposed in this country? None since 2014—in fact, a grand total of just three individuals are on that sanctions list, yet, when the new independent sanctions regime was introduced, we were promised that it would transform our capacity to take on bad people around the world. If that was true, why on earth are we not using it today?

As we have heard, the people on the sanctions list announced today have been on a US list since 2018. None of the major Russian banks has been hit with sanctions, even though they are raising liquidity in London to finance their day-to-day banking operations. If we shut them off from the liquidity of London, they would be forced to go to the central bank in Moscow, putting immeasurably more pressure on the economic structure around President Putin. The truth is that the Government have failed to take aim and target the commanding heights of President Putin’s kleptocracy and that is a mistake for which the people of Ukraine are now paying.

At least 120 oligarchs should be on the Government’s sanctions list. At least four major banks—VTB, VEB, SberBank and Alfa-Bank—should be sanctioned immediately. That is the pressure that we need to ramp up to send a serious message. Today’s failure would not be so serious if it were not part of a much broader failure. Can anyone in the House tell me: who is the Minister responsible for tackling economic crime? It used to be the right hon. Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace), who is now the Secretary of State for Defence. He had a title: Minister for Security and Economic Crime. However, that ministerial role has been deleted from the current ranks of Her Majesty’s Ministers. The new Minister is the Minister for Security and Borders.

We are told that the National Economic Crime Centre is comprehensively under-resourced for what it is trying to do. The National Crime Agency, we are told, makes a calculation as to whether it can afford the legal costs of a case before it prosecutes unexplained wealth orders. Literally, it is being scared off by the scale of the lawyers it opposes in court. The regulator Companies House does not check the information that is filed in front of it. We have journalists who are being silenced in English courts, for so long sanctuaries of justice, now arenas for silence. As we have heard so eloquently from others, we have no timetable for the economic crime Bill.

To judge the Government even on their own terms, let us look at the economic crime plan that they put forward. The analysis of the Royal United Services Institute is that 60% of the measures in the plan have not been implemented. Let us go through a couple of the points that are missing in action: clarifying the sanctions supervision powers—not done; reviewing the criminal market abuse regime—not done; developing a sustainable, long-term resourcing model for economic crime reform—not done; improving the policing response to fraud—not done. It would be laughable it was not so serious. This is not a Government who are serious about taking on economic crime and there are people around the world who are now paying the price for that negligence.

We need three things now. First, we need clear leadership. We need a Minister for economic crime, tasked with bringing forward the economic crime plan to this House at the earliest opportunity. Secondly, we need to start using our intelligence capabilities to light up who the bad actors are around the world. The fact that London and New York are the centres of financial transactions worldwide and the fact that we are the home to the SWIFT financial messaging system mean that we have unrivalled insight and intelligence into who is doing what with whom and where. Why are we not bringing those intelligence packages together and tasking them out to pursue these people? Thirdly, we need a final piece of the strategy that is modelled on the counter-terrorism strategy from a few years ago. The Contest strategy is deemed a good strategy. Its four principles—preparing, protecting, preventing and, crucially, pursuing—are good principles. The Government must now bring forward a Contest strategy for tackling economic crime. That is really what we needed as part and parcel of the sanctions legislation the Minister laid before the House today.

It was, as I have said before in the House, 33 years ago, back in 1989, that President Gorbachev went to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and gave us a vision about a common European home that stretched from the Irish Atlantic coast to Siberia. It should be a place, he said, where there is the rule of law, our great gift to the people of this world. Those days are now gone. From Kaliningrad to Kamchatka, what we now have is a great kleptosphere taking shape. It is a place where might is right, where, as the saying goes, the strong do what they can and the poor suffer what they must. We now have a task to perform in this country. It is a task we perform with our allies for the benefit of billions of people around the world—to take on the kleptosphere in new and aggressive ways. That battle is already under way, but it is time the Minister now stepped up that fight.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[James Cleverly]

With the leave of the House, I will make a few concluding remarks and address some of the issues, queries and concerns that have been brought up by hon. and right hon. Members on both sides of the House. Those in the House who have been in government know that it is never a particularly fun experience at the Dispatch Box being questioned and criticised by both sides of the House.

[Liam Byrne]

Try sitting on this side.

[James Cleverly]

No.

The House may be surprised to hear that I have taken a huge amount of positivity from the exchanges today, because this House has once again spoken with such a commanding, concerted and collaborative voice in support of the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine and in support of the Ukrainian people. More than that, this House has demanded of the Government that we go further with our sanctions—that they are harder and inflict greater economic pain on the individuals and entities in the Russian system who have done so much damage not just to the Russian people, but now also to the Ukrainian people. I am happy that is the tone of the House because I can confidently inform the House that it is demanding something of the Government that the Government are absolutely determined to do. It is pushing at an open door.

A number of questions have come up repeatedly, so I will address them.

Elections Bill

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 17th January 2022 Commons Chamber

A boundary review is coming. Let’s face it: the public do not know very well what a constituency boundary means. I can demonstrate that perfectly in my constituency. Just on the bottom corner is Atherstone. While not in my constituency, everyone locally knows exactly where it is. Although it is thought of as part of where I represent in Bosworth, Leicestershire, were I to live there, my address would come up as North Warwickshire. That creates confusion when it comes to the people we are trying to represent. I simply urge the Government to consider the amendment, to bring something forward and to find a set of words that could easily allow us all to have that choice of representing in safety.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I rise to speak to new clause 16, in my name and that of Members from four of the parties represented here in Westminster. We tabled the new clause because the Bill has many flaws, but among the worst is the lack of any attempt to clean up the laundromat of British politics, which is now awash with dark money from dubious sources. We cannot in good conscience now pretend we are unaware. The Government can no longer plead ignorance or innocence: they are either careless or culpable and we in this House cannot tolerate the situation for a moment longer. That is why the amendments we are moving are so important.

Our Pandora amendments are simple. They would insist that party donations must come from profits made here in the UK, and they would establish a new regime that would allow the Electoral Commission to call in donations for an assessment on national security grounds. As it happens, the Government have just introduced precisely that regime for investments in critical national infrastructure. What infrastructure in this country could be more important than the essence of our democracy itself? We have heard warnings from Chatham House, the Intelligence and Security Committee and from Lord Evans this weekend that our system of party funding is now wide open.

We have heard and debated in this House the example of Mr Banks, Leave.EU and the mysterious source of his gigantic loans from Rock Services—or was it Rock Holdings? Thanks to evidence given to Carole Cadwalladr and the heroic reporting of The Guardian, we know that there are all kinds of interesting and no doubt innocent connections, such as the fact that Mr Banks’s wife, Katya Banks, was given entry into the country on a passport serially numbered to a passport given to someone who MI5 reported as a Russian spy. That is no doubt completely innocent, but the fact is that, when the National Crime Agency dropped its investigation into the source of the money, it left the source of the money shrouded in mystery. The Electoral Commission was so alarmed that it issued a warning that it could open the floodgates to donations from offshore.

Let me underline why the national security assessment is important to those on the Opposition Benches, but should be of importance to the Conservative party, too. Let us take another honourable donor, Mr Mohamed Amersi, a man who together with his partner has given nearly £800,000 to good causes and who, it would seem, might qualify for a walk-on part in John le Carré’s “The Night Manager”, but not as Jonathan Pine.

Information I have seen from well-placed sources in the Kremlin shows that Mr Amersi is an associate and business partner of people with all sorts of friends, including some with close connections to the SVR and FSB. They include Yuri Lopatinsky, Ernst Stauffer, and Aleksandr Barunin, with whom Mr Amersi worked on several telecom deals, including the takeover of Megafon, the firm later accused by the Georgians of

“illegal business operations and participation in the military and economic annexation of Georgia”.

Mr Amersi made a fortune helping to sell PeterStar to a Luxembourg-based company, which—surprise, surprise—turned out to controlled by Leonid Rieman, who was none other than President Putin’s former telecoms Minister. Coincidence? You be the judge, Mr Deputy Speaker.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend has made some excellent points. The chair of the Trade Union and Labour Party Liaison Organisation, Mick Whelan, has said that trade union money is the cleanest money in British politics, and, listening to my right hon. Friend’s speech, I think I can agree with him. Given that the Bill will make that more difficult, do we not begin to see a pattern forming?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is right and he will horrified to hear that there is more.

Perhaps the most concerning of Mr Amersi’s connections is Leonard Bogdan, a man with very interesting friends in the FSB and the SVR. Mr Bogdan was a minor partner in Tempbank, which held Soviet Union Communist party assets and then specialised in covert foreign transfers. The bank was associated with several Syrian citizens supplying arms to Syria and Iran and was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2014. But Tempbank also helped to facilitate another sanctioned firm, Hudsotrade, which dealt with Russian arms and ammunition suppliers. Sources inside the Russian Government say that Mr Amersi was involved in these deals, providing finance from Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, along with private clients from Syria and Iran, to help exports into the middle east. Mr Amersi, it is said, dealt directly with Hudsotrade and two of the shareholders, who were later sanctioned.

Despite those connections, however, correspondence that I have seen shows that Mr Amersi was asked to chair COMENA—Conservative Friends of Middle East and North Africa—a new political interface between the Conservative party and the middle east established

“on the authorisation of CCHQ”.

Mr Amersi says that he had a half-hour chat with officials from the Conservative party before writing his cheques, but on the basis of the evidence to which I have drawn attention today, I think we would all benefit from the Electoral Commission’s being empowered to call in donations for a national security audit. We have allowed this regime for donations and investments in critical national infrastructure; we now need to bring in that regime to clean up the laundromat of British political funding.

Time does not allow me to highlight further coincidences—

[Cat Smith]

Has my right hon. Friend read the transcript of our Committee hearings? I hope that the Minister has had a chance to read the Russia report, because it is imperative for all of us to be well aware of the security threats that face our democracy.

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The point is that I can raise questions here that warrant further investigation—questions about, for example, Lubov Chernukhin, the model of generosity who has given the Conservatives £2.1 million, £1.9 million of it after her husband Vladimir—the same Vladimir who was appointed by Mr Putin’s deputy chairman of Vnesheconombank—received money from Suleiman Kerimov. This was a man who was later sanctioned by the United States Treasury, and not only for being a Russian Government official: he was arrested in France for smuggling in hundreds of millions of euros in suitcases.

Then there is Mr Temerko, another honourable man, who has donated £1.2 million to the Conservative party. I am told that the Prime Minister’s whiff-whaff bats are on the wall of his reception room. The only slight issue is that Mr Temerko is the man who used to operate at the very top of the Russian arms industry, with connections high up in the Kremlin—but, of course, Mr Temerko is an honourable man. He works with another honourable man, Mr Fedotov, who is a key shareholder in Aquind Ltd, which, The Guardian reports, has donated £700,000 to the Conservative party, along with another firm. This is, unfortunately, the same Mr Fedotov who, according to the Pandora papers, has revealed that his fortune was made through an offshore financial structure in the mid-2000s, at about the time when it was alleged to have been siphoning funds from the Russian state pipeline company Transneft. But, of course, Mr Fedotov is an honourable man.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

Human Rights: Kashmir

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Thursday 23rd September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for scheduling this debate and I am grateful to the all-party parliamentary group on Kashmir for its work.

I want to make three very quick points, but the bottom line is this: if this Government are serious about the rules-based order—you never know, they might be—then it is time for them to step up the fight for justice for Kashmir. There are three ways in which this can be done. First, we must say what we mean and mean what we say. All of us will have seen in Hansard that there is now a new trope, cliché, turn of phrase or diplomatic nicety: “We are aware of human rights concerns.” Well, firing pellets indiscriminately at children is not a concern: it is an abuse. Detaining thousands of people without trial for up to two years, including former chief Ministers, is not a concern: it is an abuse. Detaining people without trial for years on end, as we have heard today, is not a concern: it is an abuse. Beatings and torture: that is not a concern; it is an abuse. Troops who shoot dead labourers without trial or suspicion: that is not a concern; it is an outrage, and we should be angry in this House. Abuse after abuse; outrage after outrage; offence after offence: it is about time we started telling the truth in this House about what is going on in Kashmir.

Secondly, the Government can make it clear to both India and Pakistan that there will be no trade deals unless human rights are observed. We know that the prize for an India-UK deal is significant, at up to $15 billion over the next nine years. That is quite a treasure, but are we seriously saying here, in this House, that for $15 billion we will look the other way on human rights abuses? The world of trade is built on trust, and we cannot trust countries that break their agreements, break international agreements and perpetrate the human rights abuses we see in Kashmir.

Finally, how can we pretend that this is a bilateral issue? This is no longer a bilateral issue. The changing of the facts on the ground broke the Simla agreement. Human rights is always a multilateral issue. There have been nearly 300 international conflicts since 1945 and nearly 200 of them were settled through international brokering—think of Holbrooke in Yugoslavia and President Carter in Israel and Egypt. We need a trilateral solution.

The economies of the new silk road will be two and a half times the size of the Atlantic by 2050. Our interest and our duty is in getting involved and delivering justice for Kashmir now.

Withdrawal from Afghanistan: Joint Committee

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

I really do have to make some progress. There are a lot of points that I wish to cover. I am sure Members will be able to bring that up in the forthcoming debate.

The FCDO team in London and internationally continue to work around the clock to support processing and responding to the correspondence that has been sent by Members of this House. During the evacuation operation alone, the FCDO received, as I have said previously at the Dispatch Box, over 200,000 emails. Approximately 30,000 of these emails were from MPs. That volume reflects the concern and passion of the House, and we completely understand that. However, working through that volume of emails has been a Herculean task.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

On that point, will the Minister give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

Never has the old saying been more true: a failure to plan is a plan to fail. This Government failed to plan and these Ministers are now failing. They are failing people in Afghanistan and their loved ones here in this country.

I put on record my heartfelt thanks to those who went in to serve, to help and to aid those in need, and I put on record my thanks to all our caseworkers and staff, my own included. My staff are now supporting 1,400 people in Afghanistan, the loved ones and family members of people in Birmingham, Hodge Hill constituency. The stories they have heard have been heartbreaking, yet the Government cannot and will not even give us the courtesy of updates on that trauma. Worst have been the cases where family members here in Birmingham have had to listen to their loved ones screaming in terror down the phone and having nothing to do, nothing to say, no update, no comfort to give. One constituent said:

“I literally am on the phone...hearing them scream and cry and beg for help. I have no other choice but to listen and cry dreading if they will be found by the Taliban…they have already executed his brother. I’ve tried calling various immigration numbers, but still of no help.”

Another constituent talked of the cold fear that comes as the Taliban go door to door, hunting those who worked with the fallen regime. One told us how their father was a high-ranking colonel and former Afghan national army instructor, and their sisters were helping women to become literate and learn their rights. We were told:

“This threat is directly facing all my family”.

Another let us know that they had already received a warning letter from the Taliban and they were now in fear of going out to find food. A constituent said to me, “How is that family going to feed their children when they dare not venture into the street to get food?” She said to us that their siblings

“can’t even go outside to provide food for their kids because…Taliban is after my whole family”.

All of us in Birmingham are extremely proud of the way in which our city has stepped up—we are a city of sanctuary and we are very proud of it. Some 1,600 refugees are currently being supported in our city, and I want to put on record my thanks to Councillor John Cotton and his team for their extraordinary work. I have to say that that is in contrast to the council in the constituency of the Minister with responsibility for Afghan resettlement, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), who was in her place a moment ago. I am told that that local authority has supported just one asylum seeker since 2016. Can that really be true?

We have no details of the new scheme. We have no updates on the 1,400 cases we have filed for. We have no clarity on the resources that our city needs to provide help. We have no leadership to pull together councils in this country to provide proper support. We have no notice of the so-called “contingency hotels” that are popping up at very short notice. We have no answers to the challenges we put to Serco. We have no strategy, no updates, no clarity, no leadership and nothing to say to our constituents, citizens of this country about to lose the people they love most. These Ministers are not only risking the lives of those abroad; they are breaking the hearts of their family members here at home. The good people of Afghanistan stood with us and it is about time we stood with them.

Official Development Assistance and the British Council

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Wednesday 30th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab) [V]]

Like many others, I want to speak because I deplore these cuts in aid, which have been discussed this afternoon with so much analysis and eloquence. These cuts will have consequences; these cuts will cost lives. I like the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat), a lot, but I thought he was being almost ridiculously polite about the strategic incoherence that we now confront, because these cuts in aid deface, they demean, they damage the global Britain strategy that was set out just a few weeks ago in the House of Commons. We cannot have a Prime Minister who asks for a rules-based order and then orders the Treasury to break the rules and cut what we actually helped construct—the 0.7% aid target.

As chair of the international Parliamentary Network on the World Bank & International Monetary Fund, I just wanted to throw three points into this debate. First things first: we must reverse these cut because they are damaging the global effort to vaccinate the world. The Prime Minister sallied into the G7 talks in Cornwall with grand talk about getting the world vaccinated by the end of next year, but when the dust had settled on the G7 communiqué, the IMF revealed that we are two-thirds short of the grant finance that we need to vaccinate the world—that is $23 billion. When I asked the Prime Minister a week or two ago where that money was going to come from, he just brushed it off. That is not good enough; we need answers, and reversing the cuts in aid could help us to provide those answers.

The second point is that we need these aid cuts reversed because we need the Foreign Secretary to reacquire some credibility in order to rally the global resources that we need to tackle the pandemic and its aftermath. The World Bank thinks that we need about $200 billion extra to tackle covid-19 around the world, and $250 billion extra to reinvest in climate-friendly infrastructure in poorer countries. This week, we took a big step towards finding those resources. The executive board of the IMF basically signed off on a plan to issue $650 billion of special drawing rights. That would channel about $27 billion in extra resource to the poorest countries. But the real prize is the $623 billion of SDRs that go to richer countries. We need to recycle them; we need to revise the old voluntary agreements that entail half of that money being held back; and we need to maximise the amount of money that goes into grant rather than soft loans. We need Britain to be a force helping to lead those debates.

Furthermore, we have a big decision to make, as a world community, on replenishment of the International Development Association. IDA20 replenishment has been brought forward. The framework that was published last week has significant changes that involve prioritising investment in human capital—absolutely critical when we hear what is happening to education and girls’ education around the world. We need the Foreign Secretary to have credibility in those talks, and reversing this cut would help give him that credibility to rally resources around the world to do what the world needs to do to reverse the first rise in extreme poverty that we have seen this century.

The final point is that we judge a nation’s values by the numbers in its budget. Right now, we are putting up defence spending by something like £24 billion; we are cutting development spending by £4 billion. We are cutting the budget to prevent conflict and increasing the budget to prosecute conflict. We are even cutting aid in places where we drop bombs, like Iraq and Libya. That is just morally wrong.

I know that these things are a balance, but right now we have got the balance wrong. We need the Foreign Secretary to do a better job of fixing that imbalance now, in the comprehensive spending review. If he cannot do that, he needs to hand the task to the House of Commons. Let us have a vote and we will fix it for him.

Israel and Gaza: Ceasefire

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Wednesday 19th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. As I said in my initial response, the targeting of civilians is unacceptable, and the specific targeting of humanitarian support particularly so. I have urged Hamas and other terrorist organisations to cease their targeting of humanitarian access routes, so that our support and the support of others in the international community can get to the people who need it.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab) [V]]

We heard the Minister’s statement of policy; we just do not understand the strategy for advancing it. He has to realise, like the rest of us, that there is no peace without justice. The way to disarm Hamas, to make progress towards peace and to ensure genuine calm and de-escalation can only be through the full realisation of Palestinian rights and the end of systematic discrimination against Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

It is vital that the UK uses its influence with the United States to insist on a ceasefire. It is vital that the UK Government fully support the International Criminal Court investigation into all alleged war crimes, no matter which party stands accused, including those who are launching appalling rockets and those launching airstrikes. It is vital that we suspend the sale of arms to Israel until we know the outcomes of these prosecutions. Crucially, it is vital that the UK understands that the hope of peace is disappearing because people no longer believe that a two-state solution is possible. That is why we have to act now to sustain hope among Palestinians by ensuring recognition of the state of Palestine. We voted for it in 2014. On 7 July 2020, the Government said:

“The UK will recognise a Palestinian state at a time when it best serves the objective of peace”—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I think the Minister has got the question.