EUC Report: Money Laundering

Baroness Anelay of St Johns Excerpts

Monday 19th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

The noble Lord is moving on from the question of Somali piracy, so I must draw his attention to the fact that he has not answered the main point that I made. One can have two views about whether it is meaningful to say that there is no direct evidence of ransom moneys reaching terrorists. However, I am not pressing the point and did not press it in my introductory question. The question that I pressed, to which he did not reply, was why the Government do not consider that the assembling of such ransoms should give rise to the filing of suspicious activity reports, because the ransoms concerned will undoubtedly be the proceeds of crime and will undoubtedly end up in the hands of criminals? In all our correspondence it has been impossible to get an answer on this point. That is why I used the somewhat unparliamentary term, “obfuscation”. Why are the Government not simply telling people who put together these ransoms that if they have reason to believe that these will end up in the hands of criminals—and I cannot believe that they do not have that—then they should file an SAR? That does not mean that the person who files the SAR is committing or admitting any wrongdoing at all. However, I find it hard to believe that since the British Government are, I assume, trying to prevent the laundering of the proceeds of ransoms around the world, are working with many other countries to do that, and have, I believe, an intelligence operation based in the Seychelles to compare evidence and to try to find out where this money goes to—

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, I think that I ought to point out, without wishing to interrupt the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, although I do, that the Minister is still restricted to a 12-minute response time.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

I am sorry; I am just coming to the end. I just was saying that I still find it very odd—it would be helpful if the Minister would reply on this point—that the Government do not consider that an SAR should be filed in such circumstances.