Barry Sheerman
Main Page: Barry Sheerman (Labour (Co-op) - Huddersfield)Department Debates - View all Barry Sheerman's debates with the Home Office
Russia
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(4 months, 3 weeks ago)
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James Cleverly
The hon. Gentleman has asked a number of questions, some of which fall within the remit of the Foreign Secretary; the Deputy Foreign Secretary will answer in this House on the Foreign Secretary’s behalf, but I can let the hon. Gentleman know that the answers that I and the Foreign Office have previously given him remain unchanged. We work with our international partners, because both sanctions evasion and the fight against it are by nature international acts. As I say, enforcement is predominantly a Treasury competency and the international co-operation falls within the remit of the FCDO, but we all work to ensure that sanctions evasion does not happen.
I have to correct the hon. Gentleman. Although a number of countries are investigating what a regime for the seizure and liquidation of Russian assets might look like, and we will continue to work with our international partners to explore ways of ensuring that the people who paid for the brutality pay for the rebuilding, it is not accurate to say that other countries have seized and liquidated Russian assets.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
May I say what a pleasure it is to see that we are taking this seriously? The words of the Home Secretary filled me with renewed optimism, because we need both optimism and action. Does he agree that we can never underrate the Russians and Vladimir Putin? The fact is that they are very clever; they are using both financial strategies and dupes in Europe and other places to channel their influence. We must be wary at every level.
Does the Home Secretary think our intelligence services are equipped to cope with the real challenge that we now face from Russia, and indeed from China? Has he been picking up what I am picking up from a lot of my old friends in Washington? Not only are they very disturbed about Russian influence on American elections, but I have heard very strong information that they believe that some of the influence is coming from Russia via London and from the United Kingdom. That is a real problem.
The Home Secretary knows I have a bee in my bonnet about this, but there are people in this Parliament who have been named as very close to Russia. We had a member of the House of Lords featured in a main article in The Times only two weeks ago. Surely we must make our House and our Parliament as clean and above board as possible, and if there are such groups or individuals in this place, we should know about it.
