Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [Lords]

Debate between Lord Bellingham and Helen Goodman

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 1st May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sir Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)]

The hon. Lady mentioned the 2012 White Paper on the overseas territories, in which we said that in extreme cases we would legislate on such matters but that we would always try to build consensus first, because of our great respect for the constitutions of those territories. I plan to make a few remarks about that, but given the Government’s announcement today, will she confirm that she will not press new clause 14, which would extend new clause 6 to the Crown dependencies?

[Helen Goodman]

I will come on to that at the end of my speech.

I was explaining that these crimes are significant and that we see money being laundered in the UK, and I wanted to give the example of Mr Temerko, who was once a senior figure in Russia’s defence industry and who rose to become a key player in the Russian oil giant Yukos. His engineering company, Offshore Group Newcastle Ltd, had a large site up in Hadrian’s yard in Newcastle, where it was doing some energy work. The company won a grant from the Government’s regional growth fund in 2013, but it later went into administration and the work in the north-east was left unfinished. OGN Ltd is owned by a parent company based in the secrecy jurisdiction of the British Virgin Islands. Clearly, the effects of the lack of transparency are not felt solely in London; they are felt across the United Kingdom.

As I have said, I acknowledge that progress has been made, in so far as registers of beneficial ownership or “similarly effective systems” have been set up, but these are not transparent.