Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Debate between Lord Vaux of Harrowden and Lord Agnew of Oulton

Consideration of Commons amendments
Monday 11th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

My Lords, I hope that Motion A1 is clear. Before I start, I remind the House of my interest as a non-practising chartered accountant.

On Report, your Lordships agreed Amendment 23, which included a requirement that shareholders should have to state whether they are holding shares on someone else’s behalf and, if so, on whose behalf they are holding them. This requirement was rejected, as we have heard, by the other place. Motion A1 aims to reverse that, while trying to take on board some of the matters raised in debate in the other place. If I may, given that the debate we had in this House was now some months ago, I will briefly remind the House of the issue that that amendment was trying to resolve.

One of the easiest ways to hide the true identity of an owner of a company is to use a nominee—somebody whose name will appear on the register of members but who is in fact acting under the instruction of and for the benefit of the actual beneficial owner. A substantial industry has grown up to provide these nominee services. There are of course legitimate reasons for using a nominee, such as an asset manager holding and managing a range of shareholdings, but it is quite revealing to do a Google search of nominee shareholding services.

A near-endless list of such services appears, and these services are usually sold very clearly as being primarily about creating anonymity for the true shareholder. Let me quote from one of them:

“The beneficial owner may choose to appoint a Nominee Shareholder because they do not want to register the shares in their own name. A Nominee Shareholder is a great way to keep shareholder information away from public records”.


Another one states:

“In the United Kingdom, the purpose of using nominees is confidentiality. Because of the confidentiality requirements, owners are reluctant to associate themselves with beneficial ownership, and the practice of nominating shareholders will hide their association”.


Most nominee service providers market their services in the same vein. A few of them refer to the PSC—persons with significant control—rules or to anti-money laundering in the marketing literature, but they are very much in the minority. As I said, there are legitimate reasons for holding shares through a nominee, but not wanting to register the shares in their own name and keeping shareholder information away from public records are not legitimate reasons. In fact, that is precisely what this Bill is trying to stop.

The amendment originally passed by this House was intended to strengthen the Bill to prevent the misuse of nominees to hide the true ownership. I continue to believe that this is a very real issue and, as a result, I have tabled Motion Al, which tries to reintroduce the original amendment, but changed to reflect some of the reasons for rejecting it made in the other place—in particular, the question of undue burden that the Minister referred to a moment ago.

However, since I tabled my Motion A1, I am very pleased to say that the Government has tabled Amendment 23C within their Motion A. It shows that they now recognise that there is a genuine issue here and, in particular, that the enabling industry needs to be incentivised to clean up its act. I especially welcome the fact that proposed new subsection (2)(b) will specifically allow the Government to impose obligations directly on those who act as nominees. The real flaw in the current rules is that those enablers face no real risk at all when acting as they do. I hope that this specific mention in the Government’s Amendment 23C will cause the nominee industry to take note and clean up its act, in the knowledge that if it does not, it will face regulation.

While I would have preferred to have taken action now and introduced something in the Bill, the fact that the Government recognise the issue and are proposing a regulating power to deal with it is most welcome. I very much welcome the commitments made by the Minister a moment ago. I thank him and, given that and what he has just said, I will not press Motion A1. I thank him and his officials for their continuing very constructive engagement, which has been the case throughout the Bill. I look forward to seeing the proposed regulations before too long—he will know that I will not be dropping the issue until we see the regulations.

I shall also comment very briefly on Motion C, which moves an amendment passed in this House that aimed to fix an anomaly in the register of overseas entities, which is that it has to be updated only annually. First, I point out the reason given by the Commons:

“Because it would alter the financial arrangements made by the Commons, and the Commons do not offer any further Reason”.


That, frankly, is totally inadequate and nonsensical in this case. It has to be updated only annually. Other registers, such as the register of persons with significant control, have to be updated within 14 days of any change being identified. This anomaly means that the register of overseas entities can be up to a year out of date at any time. That introduces the risk that an innocent part might unknowingly find themselves entering into a transaction with a sanctioned person, for example.

Unfortunately, because of the way the register works in conjunction with the registration of property, this all becomes extremely complex. I thank the Law Society for its helpful and constructive engagement in many meetings over the Recess to try to find a solution to this. While we did find a possible way through, it was so convoluted as to be impractical—so I am not going to oppose the removal of this amendment, even if the issue it was trying to solve remains real.

The register of overseas entities is still in its early stage. While it has been successful up to a point, as I am sure we are going to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, there are still many properties the ownership of which is, at best, unclear. I am very pleased to hear the commitment the Minister made in his speech just now that they will keep this anomaly of annual updating under review. In the meantime, I caution any person who is buying or selling property from or to an overseas entity, or who is entering into a lease over a property with an overseas entity, to require it to be a condition of the transaction that the entity’s entry in the register is updated immediately prior to the transaction completing. Only by doing that can the innocent party know who they are actually transacting with. With that, I beg to move.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak in favour of my Motion D. I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his ongoing dialogue with me as we grind to the end of this Bill: he has been patient and courteous, as ever. My problem is that the Government continue to say one thing and then do something different. Just to remind noble Lords, the reason I pressed my original amendment was that a gaping hole had opened up in this newly created register of overseas interests. It is barely a year old and we have more than 50,000 properties owned by an entity whose beneficial owners are withheld from public view. That is approaching one-third of all entries. It is rapidly becoming the default advice from cute law firms to their overseas clients to use a trust structure that is opaque.

In rejecting my original Commons amendment, the Government claimed refuge behind the principle of financial privilege. This is bizarre, if not worse, but in a spirit of collaboration I will not use the word that I had planned to use. The costs to Companies House of publishing trust information are estimated on the back of an illusory envelope at between £600,000 and £2.8 million—a figure supported by absolutely no methodology—but under the Bill, Companies House funding is going to rise exponentially. The current filing fee of £13 will rise to anywhere between £60 and £90 if the guidance we have been given is followed. Taking the bottom-end number, £60 means an increase of £47 a year times 4 million companies, or £188 million a year, against this odd figure of £600,000 to £2.8 million. Even if the higher filing fees deterred some company creation or dissolution for non-viable entities, the additional cost, frankly, is a rounding error. Indeed, if the Government were to approach this logically and calculated that as a transparency cost, it would be around about 70p per registered company per year, or about 1.25%.

I give this example only because I continually worry that I get very clear assurances from the Minister but the actions taken by the Government are rather different. I accept through gritted teeth that we cannot debate that amendment as I was blocked from tabling it. This leaves us with a much watered-down proposal to try to hold the Government to account to get on with the consultation they say they need to ensure that there are no legal challenges. The Government have accepted that they need to start straightaway, in this calendar year, but they do not yet accept the principle of my proposed new subsection (2) that the consultation includes the principle of public access to protected data on a bulk basis.

This sounds arcane, but it is crucial because currently HMRC is not providing the information when requested, and it can be requested only on a case-by-case basis. As I have shown, there are already more than 50,000 hidden owners where the public are being denied the information, so doing it individually is simply not practical. I have consistently said that those with a bona fide need for confidentiality should have it, but this would be a very small proportion of the 50,000.

On the terms of the consultation, there are a couple of elephant traps that the Government should be aware of. A few years ago, when the consultation was issued to tighten up the non-dom loopholes, the lawyers’ excuse for not tightening them up was that anyone who declared non-dom status should have a reasonable expectation that it should last in perpetuity. That sounds pretty sinister to me, but apparently that argument has already been rolled out to civil servants on the issue of more transparency with trusts. I warn the Minister to be alert because, as I understand it, civil servants have already expressed their compliance with this idea. I hope that we as politicians are still running the country, not the civil servants.

We have heard from my noble friend the Minister and he has given commitments, which I very much appreciate. However, I hope he understands why I am extremely nervous: what he says and what the Government do are not always totally aligned. I will take his words exactly as he says them, though, and I ask him to keep a very careful eye on this process over the next few months. I think he has learned enough about me to know that, for all my many weaknesses, one thing I am is dogged. We will keep a careful eye on this. On that basis, I will withdraw my amendment.

Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Debate between Lord Vaux of Harrowden and Lord Agnew of Oulton

Report stage
Tuesday 20th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments in this group in my name, Amendments 16 and 17. I should remind the House of my interest in the register as a non-practising member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. I also take the opportunity, since it is the first time I have spoken so far, to thank the various Ministers and their officials, and indeed the registrar and her staff, for their constructive engagement and the generosity they have shown with their time. The engagement process on the Bill has been exemplary. We are helped by the fact that this is generally agreed to be a fundamentally good Bill: we are all on the same side here, just trying to ensure that it is as good as it can be.

These two amendments are designed to improve the transparency of ownership of our companies, to ensure we know who really owns or controls them. I remind the House of the words of the Minister at Second Reading:

“The use of anonymous or fraudulent shell companies and partnerships provides criminals with a veneer of legitimacy and undermines the UK’s reputation as a sound place to do business”.—[Official Report, 8/2/23; col. 1250.]


I think we all agree with that.

One of the classic ways to hide the real ownership of a company is through the use of undisclosed nominee arrangements, where a shareholder is named on the register but is in fact holding the shares on behalf of another person. At present, while the company must try to identify any persons with significant control, or PSCs, according to the guidance, all it really needs to do is look at its shareholder register: if there is no shareholder with 25% or over, it can reasonably conclude that there is no person of significant control. For example, if a company has five shareholders, each with 20%, the company can reasonably conclude that there is no person with significant control that needs to be named or verified.

However, what if those five shareholders were in fact holding the shares on behalf of a single third party? That third party would then control 100%. There is an obligation under the PSC rules for that third party to tell the company, but a dishonest actor probably would not do so. The problem is that there is no obligation for the person who is acting as the nominee to disclose that fact, which makes it far too easy for a dishonest actor to hide their identity. The company has the right to ask the nominees, but, remember, the company in my example is controlled by the dishonest actor—so it will not do that. If it is asked, it can point to the fact that it has followed the guidance, having checked its register and not found anyone with a share of 25% of more. In fact, all the dishonest actor has to do to hide their ownership is find five willing people who are prepared to have their name on the shareholder register and hold the shares on behalf of the dishonest actor. There is no comeback for these nominees. They have no obligation to disclose.

Where does one find five such willing people? I suggest that noble Lords would find it interesting to google “nominee shareholders”. They will find pages and pages of businesses that will do this, with few questions asked, for around £200 to £300 a year. They advertise specifically that the nominee service is for the purpose of hiding the true identity of the shareholder. In passing, it is worth saying that many of the people offering such services are the same people who will be the authorised corporate service providers and will carry out the ID verification under this Bill. That introduces an interesting conflict, but I stress: under the current proposals, these people will be doing nothing wrong.

Amendment 16 aims to close this loophole by making it a requirement for shareholders to state, as well as their name and address, whether they are—or, importantly, are not—acting as a nominee. If they are acting as a nominee, they would have to provide the name and address of the person on whose behalf they are holding the shares. I said that it was important that they should state that they are not holding the shares on behalf of someone else; that is because they would then have to lie actively if they are a nominee but do not disclose it. I believe that there is a real difference between lying actively and just keeping quiet passively—that is, turning a blind eye, as has happened all too often in the past.

This simple step of making people declare whether they are a nominee should make it much more difficult for dishonest actors to find people willing to act as nominees. They will need to find someone who is willing actually to lie on the record rather than just to keep quiet. Having this information will make it much easier for companies to identify hidden PSCs. Knowing which shares are held by nominees will also assist Companies House and organisations such as Transparency International to focus their attention where the risk is greatest.

We have heard the Minister telling us that we have to be careful not to create too great a burden on legitimate businesses. I agree with him, but I do not think that this would do that. Shareholders already have to provide their name and address. I struggle to understand why it would add any material extra burden to have to make a simple declaration—perhaps even as simple as ticking a box—and to provide the details of the actual beneficial owner. I really do not see that as adding any significant additional effort. In any event, there are significant benefits that arise from a company structure; it really cannot be too much to ask that the beneficial owner of the shares is disclosed in return for having those benefits.

I turn now to my second amendment in this group, Amendment 17. The Bill introduces a welcome identity verification requirement for persons with significant control, but that applies only to shareholders who own 25% or more. I should say that I know the Minister will correct me on that point, because it also applies to those who might have below 25% of the shares but otherwise exert control. He would be right, but in practice the 25% level is the driver. As my previous example shows, it is quite easy to structure a company so that there is no apparent 25% shareholder. There is certainly a legitimate debate to be had over where the correct level to trigger identity verification should lie, but I do not hear many people arguing that it should be as high as 25%.

Amendment 17 would reduce the level to require identity verification from 25% to 5%. Why 5%? There are a number of precedents. For UK listed companies, 3% shareholdings must be disclosed, with an exemption for fund managers, who must disclose at 5%, so 5% is deemed of sufficient importance for all listed companies to disclose. The rules around entrepreneur relief, which gives a reduction in capital gains tax payable on a disposal, state:

“A company is your personal company if you hold at least 5% of the ordinary share capital and that holding gives you at least 5% of the voting rights in the company”.


So tax rules consider that 5% gives sufficient influence for the company to be treated as your personal company, and there is a high degree of consistency supporting a 5% level. As I say, though, there is potentially a debate to be had about that level.

Again, I am sure we will hear that we should not create an undue burden on innocent parties, so let us consider the impact of that. I understand that the average number of shareholders for UK companies is two, so for the average company the amendment would create no additional burden; they already have to verify the identity of their shareholders. It would apply only where a more complex shareholder structure has been created with a greater number of shareholders. Yes, it would create a little more work for them, but in fact it would only increase the maximum number of ID verifications required by a company from a maximum of four to a maximum of 20, which should be easily manageable. We are not talking about companies having to verify hundreds of IDs.

Both these amendments would make a significant difference to the transparency of the register, helping to ensure—to get back to the Minister’s words that I referred to earlier—that we make it more difficult for criminals to use anonymous or fraudulent shell companies. I will listen carefully to what he has to say in response, but I give notice that I intend to divide the House on at least Amendment 16 unless he is able to provide very strong assurances.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 16 and 17 from the noble Lord, Lord Vaux. I shall also speak to my Amendment 19.

I do not want to repeat everything that the noble Lord has said, but I received a letter from my noble friend the Minister yesterday on this subject that included the subheading, “Transparency over shareholders and nominees”, and one of the arguments that the Government are making is that this could cause a significant cost to the economy. We have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, that that is, frankly, a fantasy; if the average number of shareholders per company is two—perhaps the Minister could confirm that, but it is certainly my instinctive understanding—then what is the cost?

In any case, that should be put against the cost to the economy of the fraud and economic crime that is happening at the moment at an increasing rate. We have endlessly reminded ourselves that 40% of all crime in this country is now economic crime. I know from my time in government that the loss to fraud in government alone each year—this is the bottom-end estimate by the NAO—is £30 billion, and a lot of that is facilitated through the holes in the Companies House structure. I urge the Minister to think hard about this because it is a great opportunity, at minimal cost to the economy or to business, to make a substantial change.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for a very comprehensive set of government amendments. He has completely revolutionised the impact of the Bill in relation to ACSPs. I congratulate him and his staff on that. It is important to remind noble Lords about why this is so important. Around half of all company formations occur through the offices of an ACSP. Frankly, it has been a cowboy environment. At the moment, they are not even required to be approved under the fourth anti-money laundering directive. So at one stroke with this Bill we will see a much cleaner field and a proper alignment of interests in that it will be in their interest to behave with integrity if they are to remain in business. I will not go through the comprehensive package, but my noble friend should be congratulated. This is probably the single biggest improvement to the Bill in the Companies House section.

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

My Lords, I also thank the Minister for having listened to the points that were made in our previous debates about the importance of ACSPs’ verification statements being made publicly available and for making this comprehensive suite of amendments. Indeed, I think he has gone further than my original amendments on the subject and the Bill is considerably strengthened as a result. I am extremely grateful.

Perhaps I may add one quick word in support of Amendment 93 from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew. A very high number of the ACSPs are going to be authorised and regulated by HMRC, and it is an unfortunate truth that such regulation is not the principal function of HMRC. Accordingly, that regulation has been somewhat light-touch. I ask the Minister to reassure us that considering how HMRC carries out this role will be an important part of the forthcoming consultation on AML regulation? The only requirement to become an ACSP is to be regulated for AML, so we need to make sure that regulation is robust and that only genuine, suitable persons are therefore authorised.

Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency

Debate between Lord Vaux of Harrowden and Lord Agnew of Oulton

Committee stage
Thursday 27th April 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the Government on bringing forward an amendment—it is at least a start. My noble friend the Minister said that he enjoys a lively debate and was looking forward to another one today, so I do not want to disappoint him. I speak as an SME; cut me in half, and that is what I am, and have been all my life. Indeed, my interest in SMEs long predates my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier’s interest in bribery, as I set up my first business in 1978.

My point is that I absolutely understand how SMEs think, so it is not credible to say, “Oh, we must protect them”. For a start, the way in which the categories are set excludes probably 90% of businesses in this country. I cannot work it out exactly, but it is the vast majority of commercial activity, so that makes a nonsense, frankly, of what is being suggested. On the fair application of law, to respond to my noble and learned friend Lord Garnier, a 5 foot 3 inch burglar can do just as much damage as a 6 foot 6 one. There is no logic to that—and I speak not as a lawyer but as a simple businessman.

More profoundly, unless we bring about this culture change, we are not going to get the SME community to think about fraud. If you are a victim of fraud and have the mechanisms in place to detect it because of other people doing it to you, you are far less likely to have it committed against you. All we are doing is creating an artificial bubble for people who are victims. I keep banging on about this figure, but 40% of crime in this country is now economic crime, of which fraud is a large part. So as for the idea that we are protecting SMEs in any way—we are not.

Perhaps the most important element is the professional enabler—the accountant and solicitor. We heard from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, the other day that the behaviour of the legal profession is not perhaps as pristine as it was 20 years ago. If it can take short cuts because someone looks like a juicy client, then the temptation exists. Only 100 of the 10,000 law firms in this country would have to comply with this carve-out—so that is nonsense, too. Then we come to public procurement. I was procurement Minister, and we have had a great success in government in the last few years, doubling the amount of money going from public procurement to SMEs from £20 billion to nearly £40 billion. If this provision comes in, it will have a kind of freezing effect on government. I know what officials are like—they are very cautious people and, if they feel they are taking a risk by contracting with SMEs because they, in turn, are not doing proper fraud checks, it will be another reason not to use them. So there is that perverse impact.

If we go a bit further, large corporations will find ways round this. They can create separate subsidiaries and they can use all the things we have been talking about, such as different ownership in different jurisdictions, so this will not solve the problem. The point has also been made about inconsistency: bribery has not had a carve-out for SMEs, so why should this? I ask my noble friend to put a cold towel round his head and those of his officials and come up with a credible explanation.

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the government amendment. It is a step in the right direction, but I think the Minister will hear fairly similar arguments from all of us as to why it does not go far enough—I will be doing the same thing. In simple terms, the offence that the amendment creates is that the company becomes liable if an employee of the company commits a fraud offence with the intention to benefit the company. I am struggling to understand why, if the employee of a smaller company with, say 25 or even 200 employees, commits fraud intended to benefit the company, that company should not be guilty.

At the risk of introducing a new question at this point in the debate, which I am quite pleased to be able to do, I do not understand how this works for groups of companies. Are the numbers calculated on the basis of consolidated figures or, as the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, suggested, could you just create a subsidiary specifically for the purpose of carrying out the fraud? If it is not on a consolidated basis, it cannot make sense at all.

I have worked for both large and small companies in my career and the reality is that it is much more likely that the directors of a small company will know what their employees are up to than those with a big company. They do not necessarily need burdensome processes to know what has happened. They are in the same office, they are walking the same floor and they are hearing the phone calls. In any event, it should be the responsibility of any company to have in place reasonable procedures to ensure that its employees do not commit fraud on its behalf. Frankly, that should be a basic minimum to be allowed to be in business. Because of the defences that are included, all that is required is to have in place

“such prevention procedures as it was reasonable in all the circumstances to expect”,

or to have no such procedures in place if that would be reasonable. Whether those procedures are considered reasonable in all the circumstances will be driven in part by the size and activity of the company. The Government have also given themselves power to provide guidance as do what would be reasonable and they could easily tailor that for smaller companies, so we really do not need to remove them from scope. In the absence of compelling reasons from the Minister, I would be minded to support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Fox.

The other element that seems to be missing from the government amendment is any personal liability of the company management. Without this, those who turn a blind eye to fraud can hide behind the limited liability of the company. If someone has been involved in the decision-making process that led to the failure to take reasonable steps to prevent fraud from being carried out on behalf of the company, they should personally be on the hook. Personal liability concentrates minds wonderfully. Finally, as we have heard, the amendment does not deal with the identity doctrine, which the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, tries to. Again, why not?

At Second Reading, the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, said that this Bill

“will bear down even further on kleptocrats, criminals and terrorists who abuse our open economy, and it will strengthen the UK’s reputation as a place where legitimate business can thrive, while ensuring that dirty money has no place to hide … The Bill will ensure that law enforcement and the private sector have the tools needed to help tackle economic crime, including fraud and money laundering”.—[Official Report, 8/2/23; col. 1250.]

As currently drafted, it does not achieve those aims. The UK, sadly, does not have a reputation as a place where

“dirty money has no place to hide”—

depressingly, the opposite is true. If we want to make a real difference and repair our damaged reputation, we must take genuinely robust steps.

Throughout our debates in Committee, the Government have resisted a whole range of sensible suggestions that would strengthen our fight against economic crime. Here we are again, with a set of amendments from the Government that are just too weak. The suggestions of the noble Lord, Lord Fox, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, and others would not create a disproportionate burden on businesses but would strengthen our reputation. I am becoming baffled and rather depressed by the Government’s continued reluctance to take genuinely strong action to reduce the levels of economic crime and, without genuinely compelling reasons from the Minister, I will support the noble Lords’ amendments. We have heard many times in our debates that this is a once in a decade opportunity to tackle this. We really have to take it.

Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Debate between Lord Vaux of Harrowden and Lord Agnew of Oulton

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th April 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I speak in favour of my own amendment, which is part of this group—Amendment 86, which is about asking for prioritisation of SARs reporting. Just to set the scene for noble Lords, according to the UK Financial Intelligence Unit, the praetorian guard of the NCA in this respect, there were 901,000 SAR reports in 2021-22, 70% of which related to banks. That is a number far in excess of what institutions can meaningfully deal with, so huge opportunities are being missed.

The Home Office itself has just produced its own report, called Transparency Data: Accounting Officer Memorandum: Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) Reform Programme, published on 24 February, just a few weeks ago. It accepts that there are at least four problems in our management of the SAR regime:

“Inconsistent levels of compliance reporting in some parts of the regulated sector … Insufficient human resource capacity within the UKFIU which limits their ability to analyse financial intelligence or engage with partners to improve the quality of SARs … Under-utilisation of SARs by law enforcement … Legacy IT systems which cause inefficiency and ineffectiveness throughout the regime”.


That is in the words of the Home Office, from literally only a few weeks ago. What is so frustrating is that the Government have been talking about this for at least four years. In April 2019, a strategic outline business case for the programme was reviewed by the Home Office. An economic crime plan was produced in July 2019 and then the full business case was subsequently reviewed and approved by the Home Office in April 2021. Yet we still do not seem to have a lot of action.

All my amendment is trying to do is to push the machine to get on with this. Of course, the Minister will ask me not to press the amendment, but I would ask him whether, in so doing, he can give us a date—maybe not today but in writing to the Committee—by when all this stuff will start to happen, because we are missing huge opportunities to identify economic crime. My simple proposal is to triage the SARs, so that the shortage of resource, which no doubt will remain for a while, can at least be concentrated on areas of greatest risk to our system.

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

First, the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, makes a very interesting point and I should like to hear the Minister’s views on it. I should also be interested to hear how many of the 900,000-odd SARs are acted on and followed up each year. That would be an interesting statistic to understand.

I wish to ask about Amendment 78E, which I do not fully understand. It would remove the reference being inserted into the Proceeds of Crime Act to predicate offences. I am not sure why we should take it out. It would be interesting to understand from the Minister why it was in the Bill in the first place and why the Government have now changed their mind and are taking it out. As I understand it, a predicate offence is the offence that creates the finances that are then laundered. It must in many cases be quite hard to untie those two things. I should have thought that it must be useful to any crime agency looking into these things to understand the full chain, from the original offence to the laundering of the funds. Clause 172 is talking only about information orders, not about creating new offences or anything else, so I am unclear why we would want to remove the predicate offence from the information order and would like to understand it a little more.

Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Debate between Lord Vaux of Harrowden and Lord Agnew of Oulton

Committee stage
Thursday 20th April 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to the three amendments in my name in this group, Amendments 77AA, 77C and 77D. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, for her support for the latter two. This group addresses flaws in the original economic crime legislation, the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act, and makes improvements to it. That Act was rushed through as emergency business, so I welcome the Government making these improvements, and I hope that the noble Lord recognises that my amendments are trying to do the same thing.

The noble Lord has said several times now that his Amendment 76H is very good. I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, that it is very good but could be so much better if this information was made public by default—but we have already been there.

With these amendments, I acknowledge that I am revisiting discussions that we had during the passage of the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act, and I apologise to noble Lords who may feel a sense of déjà vu in that respect. Normally, I would not revisit things that we have already discussed, but I am relying on the very clear commitment from the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, who reassured us at the time that we would be able to use this Bill as an opportunity to revisit matters that would perhaps have been the subject of Divisions in less of an emergency situation than last time. I remind noble Lords that he specifically indicated a willingness to revisit the matter that my amendments in this group are trying to address. So, while it is unusual to come back to the same thing, that is why I feel justified in doing so.

Amendments 77C and 77D are aimed at removing an anomaly, or loophole, in the overseas entities register. Amendment 77AA, which is an amendment to the Minister’s Amendment 77A, follows on from the same issue. Currently, if the details on the overseas entities register are changed—for example, if there is a change in beneficial ownership—that needs to be updated on the register only annually. This means that a person could register an entity, filing all the necessary details, and could then change the ownership or other details the very next day, but they would not need to inform the registrar until the end of the year. In my view, that is an unacceptable length of time for a register to remain out of date and inaccurate. Properties could be bought and sold during that period, without anyone knowing who is really behind those transactions.

As a comparison, the PSC rules require an update within 14 days of the company becoming aware of a change. Amendment 77C aims to bring the overseas entities register into line with the PSC register and require an update within the same 14 days. This amendment is identical to one that I tried to put to the previous Bill.

This matters for two reasons. The whole point of the register is to ensure that we know who the beneficial owner of the property held by the overseas entity is. If the information can be up to a year out of date that means we do not know. More importantly, this could lead to the risk of an innocent party who buys a property from an overseas entity unwittingly enriching a criminal or sanctioned person. That cannot be desirable.

The argument against accepting this amendment that the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, made last time we debated it was that, if there was a 14-day updating duty, a person buying a property from an overseas entity could not know if the entity would be in breach of the updating requirement. Because of the way the Act works, that could mean that the innocent party might not be able to register ownership of the property that they acquired. That is obviously very serious and it is a valid concern, which is why I did not push the matter last time round.

However, the Act actually includes a solution, in that it is possible for an overseas entity to shorten the annual reporting period, so a purchaser of the property could make it a condition of the purchase that the entity shortens the period and files an update before the purchase goes ahead. That would solve the problem, but I acknowledge that that requires the purchaser to be well advised and puts the onus on the purchaser, which is not right.

This time round, I have tried to address that problem by tabling Amendment 77D, which would require that, before an overseas entity can enter into an agreement to buy or sell a UK property, it must update the register no more than 14 days before entering into such an agreement. That would both safeguard any innocent purchaser and, combined with Amendment 77C, ensure that the register is kept up to date in the same way as the PSC rules are. I hope that would solve the problem that the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, highlighted last time round so that we can bring the overseas entities register into line with the PSC register to ensure that it is kept up to date and is not up to 12 months out of date at any one time.

Amendment 77AA aims to close the same loophole when an overseas entity applies to be deregistered. I welcome the Minister’s Amendment 77A—he said that I was nodding enthusiastically and he was right—but although that amendment would require any outstanding updates to be made before an entity can be deregistered, the same loophole exists. If no update is pending, the information on the register could be a whole year out of date because there is no requirement to update the register for a year.

Amendment 77AA would simply add a requirement that an entity should make a statement that the information on the register is up to date and accurate before deregistration can be accepted. That seems an incredibly simple way of ensuring that the register is up to date before the deregistration can happen, which is important.

I hope the Minister will see these amendments as helpful and intended to improve the overseas entities register, to remove a loophole and to make it the same as the PSC rules. It is very hard to see why it should not be. I hope he feels able to accept them.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

I strongly support these very sensible proposals from the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, which really show why hereditary Peers still have such an important role in this House. It will be very interesting to hear from my noble friend the Minister why he might wish to dismiss these amendments, because they make such a lot of sense: if you are buying from one of these opaque entities, why should all the responsibility lie with the buyer, not the seller?

Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill

Debate between Lord Vaux of Harrowden and Lord Agnew of Oulton

Committee stage
Monday 14th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

My Lords, we find ourselves in an unusual position. Normally, this House is trying to knock the edges off overzealous legislation and limit the powers the Government have a tendency to give themselves. In this Bill, we are trying to achieve the exact opposite: to strengthen the powers and close the loopholes so that the powers are as effective as possible.

We are trying to move quickly because of the awful situation in Ukraine. As the Minister said at the outset, the overseas entity register is not an emergency measure—although it will be useful in this situation. In normal times, it would be subject to much more detailed scrutiny, and we would not normally debate such wide groups as we are today. At Second Reading, I asked the Minister to confirm that the follow-up economic crime Bill would be sufficiently wide in scope to allow the matters we are covering now to be considered further, if necessary, as part of that Bill. While the Minister nodded vigorously at the time, he did not give that confirmation in his response. The House clearly accepts the need to move fast, and matters which would normally be voted on will not be pushed to a vote. I hope that the Government will reciprocate that flexibility. Speaking for myself, it would be much easier to accept the flaws and gaps in this Bill, if it were clear that there will be the opportunity to give the more detailed scrutiny which these important issues deserve in due course. Will the Minister please provide that confirmation today?

We all welcome the additional clauses that the Government are proposing on trusts, one of the more common methods to obscure ultimate ownership. Of course, trusts can be—and, as the Minister said, they usually are—perfectly legitimate. However, they can be misused. As such, I commend the Government for introducing these new clauses. That said, and in addition to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, there is still one area where an important gap remains: the classic way of camouflaging the identity of the ultimate beneficial owner is by the use of discretionary trusts. These will often have a stated beneficiary, such as a charity, but, because they are discretionary, the benefit can be passed to others who are not identified. That might be under a formal agreement, but it is often something less formal or traceable. In such situations, it can be difficult to ascertain who the real beneficiary is. The identity of “the settlor or guarantor” is one clue— government Amendment 15 rightly requires those to be identified.

The Minister kindly wrote to me yesterday afternoon—I apologise for spoiling his weekend. He said that HMRC already has access to information about beneficiaries through new data-sharing gateways and existing exchange of notes mechanisms. However, this is true only for UK resident taxpayers and for situations where money actually flows. It does not cover all jurisdictions, so the gap remains. Many of the ultimate property owners are not UK residents, and value can pass in different ways—for example, the simple right to use the property rent-free would not be picked-up by HMRC.

One other way of trying to see through such discretionary trusts is to identify who has benefited in the past, including those who have had the use of the underlying property at less than market rent. It would be relatively easy to add a subsection to the Government’s Amendment 15 to cover that, and it would not be difficult information for innocent parties to provide. Is this something which the Government could consider, even if it is in later regulation?

As a general theme, we should not be allowing overseas entities to register unless they are fully transparent. To be honest, the Government’s apparent reluctance to accept clauses which would improve that transparency is somewhat concerning. On that theme, I also wholeheartedly support Amendment 17. It seems rather pointless to have information on the overseas entity, if that still fails to show us who owns the property. I urge the Minister to look at that seriously.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak in support of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and his Amendment 17. I recognise that the Government have made big strides in the last few days to listen to the concerns which are so widely held. However, given all this effort, and given that the Bill has sat almost ready for four or five years, I feel that we could go further today and do the job properly.

There is no point in legislating for a Bill that leaves huge gaps for more anonymity. I am really sceptical about the need for endless anonymity. The people who strive to have anonymity do not always have it for the right motives. We need to recognise that. I said to the Minister before we came to the Chamber that we spend our lives being entirely reasonable in this country while trying to deal with very unreasonable people. Of course, we must stick to the law, but we need to have the levers in the law which enable us to tackle these bad actors. This is why, in my own slightly layman attempt with Amendment 23, I have tried to bring more focus on the promoters of these organisations. This is to ensure that there is much more responsibility taken by directors who promote organisations, and that they help to provide proper due diligence when working with the sorts of people they are busily defending anonymity for.

Economy: Update

Debate between Lord Vaux of Harrowden and Lord Agnew of Oulton

Tuesday 28th April 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

My Lords, while they are obviously very welcome, the bounce-back loans and other measures can be only a short-term fix. Many businesses that are currently allowed to operate are not doing so at the moment and others—garden centres, for example—could operate safely. Does the Minister agree that it would be better if businesses which could operate safely did so to minimise the damage to the economy? What help, financial and practical, can the Government offer to businesses which adapt their operations to enable a safe return to work as soon as possible?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I am afraid the noble Lord rather broke up on me. Madam Deputy Speaker, did you hear the question?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden]

Certainly. Many businesses that are currently allowed to operate are not doing so while others that could operate safely are not currently allowed to do so. Does the Minister agree that it would be better if businesses that can operate safely do so? What help can the Government offer to businesses to alter their operations to enable a safe return to work as soon as they do so?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I share the noble Lord’s concerns about businesses that could be operating. I think we are seeing a gradual return to work. Businesses have now worked out how to manage the requirements of social distancing. Putting the health of the nation first is the Prime Minister’s priority, but if we look at the existing rules, a business can ask its employees to come in if they are not able to work at home effectively, if the employee is fit and well and is not living with someone who is self-isolating for fear of infection or who is on the official medically vulnerable list and if they are able to avoid crowded public transport, which may mean more flexible working hours. The key point the noble Lord makes is that businesses can adapt to provide reasonable social distancing measures in the workplace. That is already in the rules; I expect to see further clarification.