Russian Assets: Seizure

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

I want to speak briefly very much in support of the ten-minute rule Bill of the hon. Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant). It seems perfectly obvious to me that the money is there for winning the war. Money has been given in weapons, tanks and other methods, but we also need to invest strongly in building the peace, rebuilding Ukraine and making sure that people who have absolutely no blame in this conflict are not left living their lives in ruins.

On 10 December 2022, President Zelensky said:

“Bakhmut, Soledar, Maryinka, Kreminna. For a long time, there is no living place left on the land of these areas that have not been damaged by shells and fire”.

Investment must be put into rebuilding all of the cities in Ukraine that have been damaged—the bridges, the infrastructure and the things that make life possible. A significant investment is also required in demining and the removal of ordnance, without which none of the construction can safely go ahead. That will be a significant task that the Government must invest in. I am conscious that occasionally somewhere in Glasgow we unearth a world war two bomb, so given the intensity of shelling that has happened in Ukraine, there has to be significant investment in demining to allow things to go ahead.

This is logical when we recognise that so much of this money is right here; it is in bank accounts in this country. In some cases, assets have been frozen, but we must find a way of reclaiming that money, which does not belong to the oligarchs in the first place. This is money they have plundered and do not deserve, and it must be returned to the Ukrainian people to allow them to rebuild.

As I have said many times in this place, the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill requires strengthening. There are more things it could do to tackle many aspects of money laundering that allow that money to flow through the United Kingdom. Transparency International UK has mentioned several areas where it could be tightened. It could prevent UK companies from being used to provide a veneer of legitimacy for money launderers by ensuring transparency over shareholders, members and partners. That is still not the case in the Bill. It could improve the Companies House register of accuracy by enabling Companies House to verify and publish shareholder information. It could catch rogue operators by providing Companies House with powers to check the documentation of “know your customer” checks carried out by third-party agents. Many of those third-party agents are where the problem lies with verification. There must also be a credible deterrent to money laundering. We must resource agencies that have to do the important work of checking and interrogation to ensure that economic crimes do not continue to go unpunished, and to have a far more effective system to prevent the UK from being seen as the location for economic crime that it has sadly become.

I want to talk a little about Scottish limited partnerships, which have long been used to give many of these companies a veneer of respectability. They have been implicated in economic crime through the Panama papers, and many other scandals over the years, and they are still being used, not for the purposes for which they were originally set up 100 years ago, but for hiding wealth. The Ferret news agency in Scotland has found that, of the 631 SLPs created last year, only three were formed by residents of Scotland. That should set off an alarm bell. It says to me that they are not being used by people in Scotland for the purposes for which they were historically needed. Eighty per cent. of those SLPs were formed in just three addresses in central Edinburgh. These are not real companies carrying out real work; it is happening in plain sight.

The Ferret found that 38 firms registered with MYCO Works, one of the Edinburgh companies, name Matthew Bradley in their accounts. He was sanctioned by the United Nations after a fraud investigation into SLPs. He has links to Serhiy Kurchenko, a Ukrainian billionaire who fled to Russia after it was alleged that he failed to pay tax. He was sanctioned by the UK in 2020 and the UK Government alleged at that time that he

“facilitated the supply of oil from Russia companies to their Crimea-based subsidiaries in the first year of the Russian occupied Crimea, enabling the Russian companies to bypass EU sanctions.”

In April this year, the EU sanctioned Kurchenko for aiding Russia’s attacks on Ukraine and, in 2017, after he fled Ukraine, prosecutors moved to seize his company’s assets as part of the

“criminal group organised by Serhiy Kurchenko.”

Bradley was named as the ultimate beneficial owner of UMH Group, which was in the company’s structure documents. So a web of firms is being set up under SLPs by those means through the UK, which the UK Government could be doing a hell of a lot more to clamp down on. They are allowing that sanctions busting and veneer of respectability, and it is exploiting the people of Russia as well as the people of Ukraine. I urge the Government to take the issue much more seriously and to amend the Bill to shut down all those loopholes.