Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill

Debate between Lord Vaux of Harrowden and Lord Sikka

Committee stage
Monday 14th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to a number of amendments in my name in this group—there are eight of them—and I will be fairly brief.

First, Amendments 5 and 13 basically ask the beneficial owners and various other parties to provide their former names. In Part 4 of Schedule 1, the Bill requires managing officers who are managing the beneficial owner’s interest to provide their former names. But the same is somehow not required for registerable beneficial owners where they are persons other than individuals—which could be companies that are forever changing their names, or other parties. What I am seeking to do through Amendments 5 and 13 is to, as it were, align the various provisions in the Bill, and I hope that the Government will be agreeable to that.

Amendments 8, 12 and 14 require the beneficial owners, or their managing agents et cetera, to provide a list of any criminal convictions and sanctions against them. At the moment, the Bill does not ask for that kind of information, so it is perfectly possible for somebody to look at this proposed register of property ownership and not know that the ultimate beneficiaries have various convictions, which may well be abroad. It really exerts pressure on them to either come clean or to avoid the UK altogether—which perhaps would be more preferable. Again, it is a fairly straight forward suggestion asking the Government to act upon that.

The meatier part of my eight amendments relate to Amendments 18, 19 and 20, which take issue with the Government’s provision of the definition of registrable beneficial interest, generally taken to be 25% of the shares or voting rights, or somebody having significant influence or control. As it is now defined it is too wide. Indeed, the provision of any number is too wide. If you say it is 25%, it is not inconceivable that half a dozen people will get together and make sure that nobody gets to 25%. If you specify 20%, that will be exactly the same. So four, five or six drug traffickers can get together and own a fraction of a company, and through that they can invest their proceeds in a property. Under this kind of approach, none of them would be identified as a beneficial owner or count as a person of significant control, because they do not meet the thresholds specified in the Bill.

The Bill as presently drafted leaves open the possibility that companies holding UK property would continue to hide the identity of true owners by claiming that there was no beneficial owner. This is already a major problem at Companies House for the companies already registered in the UK. That has been identified by a number of whistleblowers and a number of leaks that we have had. However, rather than tackling the issue, the Government have imported these problems into the Bill, and it is quite likely that the Bill will not achieve its assumed objectives.

So I suggest that there should be no numerical specification of the beneficial interest definition; rather, any interest should be disclosable. It is not every day that ordinary individuals want to buy UK property through opaque offshore companies. They have a reason why they want to do this, so we must make sure that absolutely no door is open to them. By leaving this definition, the danger is that the Bill simply will not achieve its objectives. I therefore recommend my amendments to the Government in the hope that this will help to end the abuses.

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

My Lords, I support most of the amendments in the group, including the government amendments, which are generally very helpful.

I will speak to Amendment 24 in my name and to the similar Amendment 23, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, both of which are intended to address the possibility of there being a very long period between a change in the ownership of the entity and that change being reported in the annual update. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, for his support in this. Amendment 23 would require an update to be filed within 14 days of when a person has become or has ceased to be a registrable beneficial owner. My Amendment 24 is slightly wider, requiring any changes in registered information to be reported within 14 days. However, both amendments seek to bring the overseas entity regime into line with the persons of significant control regime that UK companies must follow. To be honest, I would be content either way.

As the Bill is currently drafted, an overseas entity could register and then immediately change its beneficial ownership and we would not get to know about that for a full year, during which time any number of actions could take place, including the sale of the property to an innocent third party who unwittingly might find themselves enriching a criminal or someone subject to sanctions.

The Bill rightly puts restrictions on the disposition and registration of property, but it does nothing to deal with the more likely scenario of the overseas entity itself, or indeed an entity further up the ownership chain, being sold; indeed, this 12-month grace period almost wilfully ignores that. It seems rather perverse that the overseas entity regime should be more benign than the regime that applies to persons of significant control for UK companies.

In his helpful all-Peers letter of Friday, the Minister explained that the reason they have done it this way is to protect innocent third-party buyers from not being able to register the purchase of a property if the overseas entity turns out to be in breach of the requirement to report a change. That is obviously extremely important. However, a very simple solution is already built into the Bill. The overseas entity has the ability, under Clause 7(8), to shorten the update period and file an update immediately before it sells. Any innocent buyer would simply insist that this happens before the sale is completed, and that would deal with the problem that the Minister explained. Accordingly, I see no reason why one of Amendments 23 or 24 should not be accepted, so that overseas entities would have the same reporting requirements as UK companies have. The whole point of the overseas entity register is that we should know who beneficially owns UK properties. Allowing that information to be potentially up to 12 months out of date cannot make sense. I cannot think of any other corporate register that would allow such a long period to notify changes.