Criminal Finances Bill (Second sitting)

Antoinette Sandbach Excerpts

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 15th November 2016 Public Bill Committees

[Richard Arkless]

Q Do you think that your members are in favour of the Bill’s corporate claim provisions? How do you think your members would react to those provisions being extended beyond tax evasion?

Anthony Browne: As I said in response to the question from Dr Huq, we do not think it is necessary, but we accept it and we have worked very closely with the Government on it. We are doing tax guidance–– 60 pages of guidance for banks to help them comply. In terms of extending it to a general criminal offence in respect of facilitating economic crime more widely, I just make this observation. There are lots of different bits of regulation and legislation on different elements of financial crime. There is tax evasion, counter-terrorism finance, money laundering and bribery. They all operate in a different way, and we would like to see a more coherent view of financial crime more generally. This is a longer term aim and this Bill is part of it. They are all different aspects of financial crime, so we are not opposed to the broad principle of extending it but we would say that it would need very careful consultation. You would need to think through very carefully how it might operate in order to make sure that there are no unintended consequences because there are a lot of very detailed complexities. You need to make sure that it would work effectively in the way that you, Parliament and the Government intend.

[Antoinette Sandbach (Eddisbury) (Con)]

Q Back in 2012, Coutts was fined £8.75 million by the FCA for systemic failings that had resulted in an unacceptable risk that it had handled the proceeds of crime. Do you think part 3 of the Bill will effectively address those risks at a banking level? In the not so distant past, we had HSBC Switzerland accounts being used to evade UK tax. Are you confident that the measures in part 3 will address those systemic failings in the banking sector?

Nausicaa Delfas: The Bill’s provisions will certainly help law enforcement to address these issues and, by virtue of that, will also have an impact on the banks themselves.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q Will they help you as a regulator?

Nausicaa Delfas: From our perspective, the areas that will particularly help us are information sharing, which I mentioned—so greater effectiveness in the anti-money laundering regime to detect and prevent instances of money laundering—and the civil recovery powers being extended to the FCA in line with those of other law enforcement agencies, so that when we undertake investigations we are able to move forward and take the civil recovery as well. That will help the FCA.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q The corporate responsibility obligations are only on tax evasion. They would not pick up issues around the LIBOR scandal, for example. Do you think any other measures are needed in the Bill or are you satisfied that it provides the appropriate tools?

Nausicaa Delfas: From our perspective, it is not so much a matter of powers. To go back to information sharing, the one proposal we would make is for the threshold for sharing information to be lowered, so that institutions can share information when they see unusual activity and not just when they actually have enough information to have a suspicion, because then they have to file a SAR. I know that there would need to be safeguards and that we would need to look into the matter in more detail, but the biggest benefit from our perspective would be to enhance that and therefore get better quality, rather than quantity, of information going to law enforcement.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q Mr Browne, you spoke about other pieces of legislation. Those have clearly not stopped the kind of matters that I referred to, in terms of the way the law has been interpreted or applied by your members. You said that you felt your members would be willing to have the scope of the Act extended to a broader economic crime.

Anthony Browne: You raised the question of LIBOR. Legislation was brought in after LIBOR to deal specifically with that. I should say more generally that we support almost everything in the Bill to different degrees. As banks, we are totally committed to combating all forms of financial crime. We spend in excess of £5 billion a year doing it and we want to make sure that that is as effective as possible. We have thousands and thousands of staff who deal with it. We support provisions such as information sharing, undisclosed wealth orders, disclosure orders and so on—we can talk about those in more detail later, perhaps.

In terms of widening the criminal offence to prevent wider economic crime, my point was that it is very complicated when you get into the details. We would caution against introducing it suddenly without detailed consultation about how it might operate or not operate. There is a very complex constellation or jigsaw, with lots of different interlocking bits of legislation and regulation on financial crime. Putting a blanket thing on top could make it less effective and lead to unintended consequences.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q Ms Bell, do you think part 3 of the Bill will affect your members more, particularly the high street firms that may be caught by its provisions?

Amy Bell: I echo what the BBA said in relation to the smaller firms and their resources to implement these things. We in the Law Society provide quite a lot of support for the smaller firms—the high street firms. In relation to these kinds of offences in particular, we published a toolkit when the Bribery Act 2010 was being implemented to help our members to implement the Act.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q But should not your members be aware of what constitutes tax evasion?

Amy Bell: Yes, sorry—the reasonable provisions. Sorry, I am talking about the procedures that they need to put in place. That is the part that would be difficult for smaller firms that do not necessarily have compliance departments to help them with that. We are talking about practitioners on a day-to-day basis. They will absolutely understand the law but it is about what reasonable preventive provisions they need to put in place.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q And you are providing guidance on that, or you will do.

Amy Bell: Yes, absolutely.

[Victoria Atkins]

Q (Louth and Horncastle) (Con): Just to pick up on that point, tax evasion is tax evasion, whether it is committed by small companies or large companies.

Amy Bell: Yes, of course.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Huq]

Q The Public Accounts Committee has raised concerns that there is not a sufficient number of successful prosecutions of offshore tax evasion for it to deter people effectively. Do you agree and do you think that the new corporate offence in part 3 will make a difference?

Toby Quantrill: I think it has the potential to make a difference. The critical thing is to avoid these things happening in the first place. It is important to have some sort of measure that creates the requirement to put in place the measures to stop this from happening. As I said, it is a measure that we welcome. We especially welcome the fact that it applies to the way that UK companies act anywhere in the world.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q I am not as familiar with the Scottish devolution settlement as you are, but I had always understood that Scotland had a separate legal jurisdiction.

David Leask: That is correct.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q Can that legal jurisdiction not regulate the Scottish companies that you refer to? Where does the ultimate responsibility for that regulation lie? Is it with the Scottish Parliament or with Westminster?

David Leask: You probably need to speak to somebody more qualified in the law than I am. I can tell you about what these companies do and why people want to own them. Obviously, the companies were created by this place more than 100 years ago and not by the Scottish Parliament. In terms of law enforcement rather than regulation, if you were to ask the police what they would do about this, I honestly think they would tell you that they would do very little, because the criminality, or sometimes the unethical behaviour, is being carried out outside the legal jurisdiction of Scotland.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q I accept that, but what I am asking—it may well be that you do not know the answer and we need to get that from elsewhere—is whether company law is devolved in Scotland.

[Hon. Members]

No.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

My suggestion was that, given that there is a separate legal jurisdiction, there is the power already in Scotland to deal with these matters, but I see my colleagues are shaking their heads. To that extent, would the changes, particularly in part 3 of the Bill in terms of corporate responsibility for tax evasion, largely address the concerns that you have?

David Leask: I do not think it is my job to come here and have concerns. It is my job to come and tell you what these companies are doing, why people are using them and just how many of them there are.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q Have you looked at the Bill and read the provisions that are in it?

David Leask: I do not feel qualified to tell you as a legislator how to legislate, I am afraid. Sorry.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q You cannot give us an opinion on whether you think it will tackle the abuses that you are trying to describe to us?

David Leask: There is a reasonable case for the United Kingdom authorities to take a detailed look at Scottish limited partnerships and what it is that they do. I think there is a reasonable case for you to look at what similar English companies are doing and ask yourself whether you want Britain and Scotland to be associated with that kind of activity, and whether you think that is good for your national brands.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q We heard the evidence of the various law enforcement authorities in earlier sessions. I do not know whether you were here for that, but they were quite clear about the additional protections the legislation will afford them in tackling illegal tax evasion.

David Leask: They would be better placed to tell you about that than I would be. However, the issue really is that right now, tens of thousands of companies and firms are operating around the world and we do not know who owns them. They are involved in things that are quite questionable, from simple matters of peddling diet pills that do not work and combs that they tell you will grow your hair back—I am sure they do not—to very serious criminality, including, for example, being used as legal intermediaries by corrupt officials in countries such as Ukraine. Prosecutions are now under way of individuals in Ukraine who are accused of using Scottish and English companies as intermediaries in arms deals. These are serious matters, and they are outwith the jurisdiction of the law enforcement officials that you saw this morning. It is within the power of Westminster to change the law in respect of Scottish limited partnerships, but you probably need to take a closer look at what they are doing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Huq]

Q A last question from me: the new corporate offence relates to cases of tax evasion, so is there a case for extending it to come down on companies for facilitating tax avoidance?

Dame Margaret Hodge: Or economic crimes. Can I just say again that I really welcome the Bill? This is the first time that we have tried to get at those companies and organisations that are actually responsible for devising many of the schemes that lead to aggressive tax avoidance or evasion. It is a really important toe in the water and a first step forward. The real experts on this are Edward Garnier, Nigel Mills and Catherine McKinnell—all lawyers who have been arguing strongly that the provisions ought to cover all economic crime.

Another amendment could be really helpful. If we could at least have a report to Parliament showing how the failure to prevent tax evasion power is actually being used by the enforcement authorities, I think that would really improve the Bill. I would like to see how much it is used. We could then see how effective it is, as with the unexplained wealth orders—it is important to report to Parliament once a year on the progress made on the use of unexplained wealth orders. I cannot see anything particularly controversial about that sort of amendment, so I would do it for both. Of course, I think you will find that the lawyers think we should do this for all economic crimes. I am with the lawyers on this.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q Dame Margaret, I am very interested by your proposal that that should apply effectively to every company’s beneficial ownership, because it was, of course, the Government that you were part of in 1998 that passed the Data Protection Act, which recognised that there should be privacy around individuals and disclosure of their data. Why, at that time, did you not—

Dame Margaret Hodge: Sorry, I am trying to think what you are getting at here. I do not quite understand what aspect of the Bill you are referring to. I am really sorry.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

You are talking about disclosure of beneficial ownership—

Dame Margaret Hodge: By companies.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

By companies, which would presumably relate to named individuals. The register looks at controlling interests—

Dame Margaret Hodge: The register of beneficial ownerships?

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Yes, of named individuals or other companies. I can see why, if it is another company, there would not be an issue, but if it is a named individual, this Parliament decided to protect data around individuals. Does your premise not assume that every company is therefore acting in a way that is, in effect, criminal, and should not the burden be the other way? In other words, having private registers allows the Government to interrogate the data where there are serious allegations of crime, but still to protect the privacy of individuals.

Dame Margaret Hodge: I am slightly muddled, so I apologise if I am answering this wrongly—if so, do come back at me. The register of beneficial ownership of companies in the UK is actually public. It is not private. In fact, I think another weakness of the Bill, and of the unexplained wealth orders, is that until we bring into legislation the George Osborne commitment that there would be a register of beneficial ownership of properties in the UK, it will be very difficult to administer the unexplained wealth order power. I hope the Committee will look at that.

Do I think it will create difficulties for individuals? I do not. Should we have done it? Yes. It is ironic, the whole issue. It gained momentum. It was not a big issue at the time. That is my only explanation. Transparency is at the heart of it. Whenever I look at any of these problems, I always find that if you have transparency, you are well on the route to tackling some of the bad behaviour, be it tax evasion, avoidance or whatever. Have I not answered properly?

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q Clearly there is a distinction between evasion and avoidance. One is legal, and the other is illegal.

Dame Margaret Hodge: Can I come back on that?

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Certainly.

Dame Margaret Hodge: There is a distinction. I call it a spectrum, which is why I think this power is limited and why we need to think further. There is a spectrum from sensible tax planning through avoidance and into evasion. The honest truth is that people often say to me, “But we’re only acting within the law.” There is a story in The Guardian today about people being employed by companies set up to avoid national insurance and other taxes.

The reality is that when we as parliamentarians write far too complex, far too long tax law, we have an intention. If we could write it in a way that was really copper-bottomed, covered every eventuality and had no ambiguity, we would do so. I do not think this is a particularly partisan thing. We cannot do it. Therefore, you find that a lot of aggressive avoidance is unlawful when HMRC finally, if it has the resources, catches up with it, but it is difficult to call it evasion.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q I understand that there are now changes. We are awaiting tribunal assessments where there is doubt about whether it is legal avoidance or illegal evasion, but the law has now been changed to require individuals to pay up front.

Dame Margaret Hodge: That is an improvement.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

The burden has been reversed.

Dame Margaret Hodge: But it still assumes that HMRC catches up with them, and it does not always do so.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q Given that this is a really important first step, and that the Government are working with the overseas territories to get co-operation, would it not be useful, rather than going to a broader system that is more difficult to manage, to focus on the more serious cases and allow that co-operation initially? If it is then seen to be inadequate, we can perhaps broaden it out.

[The Chair]

Order. Before you answer that, Margaret, we have two Members still to ask questions and you have got two minutes. I am going to ask them to ask their questions, and then we can hopefully get some correspondence from you to answer the questions more fully.

Dame Margaret Hodge: There are lots of answers. One is that they have had three years to get on with it, and they have not done it. David Cameron said they should be public at this point. I am sure people have talked to you about the Panama papers, but so much of that went through the BVI, for example—nearly half of the corporations were established through the BVI. If we do not tackle that, it particularly impacts on the poorest countries because they do not have the resources we have for enforcement. We are bad at it, and they are even more poorly equipped. If they do not have the resources, they lose three times as much in tax avoidance and evasion as they gain through the international aid that we give. They have had their time, and this is the moment when we should get tougher. We are saying that there should be a timeline.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Huq]

Q Are you confident that enforcement agencies will have sufficient resources to make full use of the new powers in the Bill? I am thinking of the creaking IT system, ELMER, which was designed to cope with 20,000 SARs a year, and the figure at the moment, before this legislation, is more than 300,000.

Tom Keatinge: Resourcing is clearly a major issue. Cynically, one of the reasons for involving the private sector is to harness it to do some of the work. The point that I was trying to make in my remarks was that implementation will be critical. I do not believe we have the resources that we need. For the structure as it currently exists, the question is whether we are tackling financial crime the right way or whether we can make more efficient uses of the resources we have. Do we really need to have 381,000 SARs a year, and everything that that means for resourcing? We do not have them for the structure that we have now. Is the structure we have the right one? That is the question that we need to answer.

Duncan Hames: I would not go as far as to say that we were confident, although I am sure that people make special pleading cases with every area of Government spending. Reform of the use of the consent SAR would help to give more time for law enforcement bodies to collect the information they need to know how best to respond to it. That is a welcome measure in the Bill.

Chido Dunn: One argument made for public registers in places such as the overseas territories is that there can be more eyes than just law enforcement and Government actors. People such as journalists and civil society actors like us can help the process by identifying potential crimes and alerting the authorities to them.

Dr Hawley: We would like to ensure that the National Crime Agency’s international corruption unit, which will bear the brunt of enforcing unexplained wealth orders, is adequately resourced. We have concerns that at the moment there is not enough transparency in the funding model of that unit. It is partly funded by the Department for International Development, which leaves a whole series of countries that are not DFID priority countries to be funded. We need transparency that the Home Office is putting up the matching funding to cover those countries, because UWOs are going to be global—they will not be just for DFID priority countries.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q Mr Keatinge, may I pick up on the point about reporting to Parliament? It is very easy to get data in the public domain about the number of requests or prosecutions under a particular Act: you can use the Freedom of Information Act, or parliamentarians can table written questions to get those data in the public domain. Why do you feel that that requires a report? Dr Hawley, in relation to the cadre of specialised financial crime judges, why do you say that judges are not capable of adequately dealing with financial cases when effectively you have juries sitting on them? If you cannot explain them to the jury, you will certainly not be able to explain them to the judge.

Tom Keatinge: Let me take your first question. The way in which we seek to tackle financial crime in the UK cuts across a number of different Departments. There are many cooks in this particular kitchen, for various reasons. As an outsider, my question is: who is ultimately accountable for ensuring that the Bill is used effectively when it is enacted? Should there be a commissioner? Ultimately, what I would like to see is someone who has to report to Parliament what has happened as a result of the new legislation. As for where that information comes from, I accept that it can be brought to light by Freedom of Information Act requests or other means, but I would like to see someone made accountable for explaining how the Act has been used.

Dr Hawley: Judges play a key role in instructing the jury how to interpret some parts of the law. These are incredibly complex cases. In a way, we are reflecting what has been expressed to us by some in the law enforcement community who are trying to put these complex cases to judges who are not specialists and so do not have the level of knowledge about the crimes that they would like.

[Antoinette Sandbach]

Q That could apply to any crime, whether it was murder or child pornography.

Dr Hawley: The difference is that these are much longer trials than for those kind of crimes. Another key issue is that cases of economic crime are often at the back of the queue for court slots, essentially because defendants are often given bail, which in murder cases they would not be. That is why it takes so long for the Serious Fraud Office to get court slots.

[Tristram Hunt]

Q Could the Committee have some examples from Global Witness of case studies of that three-way process—the extraction of wealth, often from developing nations, the facilitation via London and the hiding of that wealth in overseas territories or Crown dependencies? It would be good to have some narrative examples. Secondly, one issue that has been put to the Committee and on which I will pursue a probing amendment is the fear among enforcement agencies that, if they use unexplained wealth orders or go after those who have allegedly hidden wealth and committed crimes, they will be liable for the costs involved. That has serious ramifications for the culture of risk within an organisation. I am interested in whether you think either that those costs should not be borne by the state or that they should be capped.

Chido Dunn: I will speak briefly to the narrative examples point, but I am happy to provide more. One of the case studies we worked on, which was covered on the BBC last week in anticipation of the Bill, was a case that arose in Kyrgyzstan. The former President was overthrown in a coup and he and his family were accused of widespread corruption and violence. His son fled and arrived in the UK on a private jet and claimed asylum. At Global Witness, we identified him living—we have no proof of who owns the property—in a mansion in Surrey. It was purchased for £3.5 million six or seven years ago, so it is worth a lot more than that now. The home is owned offshore and no one can prove exactly who owns it or where the money came from.

At the time when the Bakiyevs were in power, Kyrgyzstan was ranked by Transparency International as one of the 20 most corrupt countries in the world. Since then, we have seen the Kyrgyz authorities trying to rebuild their courts and their systems and not receiving the assistance they would like from foreign powers. They are finding themselves coming up against a lot of legal hurdles around issues of mutual legal assistance, extraditions and things of that nature. That is just an illustration of the extent of plundering that can happen overseas, the fact that London in particular is seen as a safe haven by corrupt officials and their families, and some of the practical difficulties in trying to seize those assets or identify the people involved. In that case, we identified UK estate agents and lawyers involved in the deal.

That is one of the best case studies that shows how a Bill such as this could help. It would allow the police to have more time to conduct their investigations. It would lessen the burden on them in identifying who owns a property and whether the money came from legal sources. There are many, many other examples that we could give, but generally it is the same pattern of behaviour that we see time and time again.

Duncan Hames: It is not initially clear from the Bill what the degree of exposure in relation to costs for law enforcement would be. It may be that the investigatory order of the UWO is less exposed to action to recover costs than other asset recovery actions and the interim freezing order, for example. Perhaps in the course of the Committee’s consideration, you will be able to get some clarity on that. We would like you to bear in mind that there will be a great backlog of established illicit wealth already in this country for law enforcement to address when awarded this power, should the Bill become law. We would not want them to be impeded from making full use of this law because of potentially intimidatingly large costs being incurred by those against whom they are using either the unexplained wealth order or the interim freezing order.