Corporate Transparency and Economic Crime

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

As my right hon. Friend appreciates, this legislation is timely. We are grateful that it seems to have elicited huge support across the House, and we are pleased to be able to expedite it.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. I also thank the small Business Minister—the Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully)—for giving me and my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn) his time earlier, which was appreciated.

I put on record the concerns that many of my Glasgow Central constituents have expressed over the weekend for the people of Ukraine. They call on the Government to do more. Like me, they will welcome action on sanctions and on the flow of dirty money through the City of London, so I am glad that there will be reform of Companies House. It is long overdue, and SNP Members have not been holding it back; we have been calling for it constantly for years. The Government have had multiple chances to deal with it.

As an interim step to action on Companies House, will the Government use the Verify scheme to ensure that people cannot fill the register with absolute guff, as happens now? Will they give Companies House interim anti-money laundering responsibility until the new Bill comes into force? When it does, will it be retrospective? Will it go back to the register and root out all the nonsense, or will it start again from scratch?

I am glad to hear about the register of overseas entities in the Bill, but I would like to know how it will differ from the draft Registration of Overseas Entities Bill. I sat on the Joint Committee on the draft Bill; our report came out in May 2019. How will the new Bill differ? Will it pick up on issues around definitions of legal entities, the use of trusts and the loopholes that they create? Will it take action on Scottish limited partnerships, which have legal personality and can hold property? Tackling them in the Bill is crucial.

Will we look at the cost to land registries of working on the Bill? In Scotland, the register of persons holding a controlled interest in land will come into force on 1 April 2022 and will include overseas entities, so the Scottish Government are moving on the issue in just over a month’s time. What conversations has the Secretary of State had with the Scottish Government on how the Scottish register will interact with the UK register?

Will the Government go after the enablers—the estate agents, the lawyers and the accountants who have facilitated so much of the kleptocracy in this country? They have to be held to account, too. I am glad to see that unexplained wealth orders, which have not been working properly—I understand that there have only been nine since their inception—are being fixed. I look forward with interest to that happening.

Finally, what will the Government do about enforcement? They can have the finest laws in the land, but if there is no action and no investment in enforcement, there is little point in having them at all.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s remarks. As far as the enablers are concerned, we have legislation already on the statute book. As my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary said in her statement, we are looking at other measures to tighten the regime.

We work with DA Ministers constantly. The Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), has engaged ably and directly with DA Ministers, and we look forward to doing so.

This set of measures is only the beginning of the much tighter regime that we want to bring in. [Interruption.] People are chuntering from a sedentary position, but I would like to point out that these matters, particularly those regarding cryptocurrencies and cyber-crime, are complicated. We are trying to expedite legislation on those fronts as quickly as possible.