Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill

Debate between Chris Bryant and Kieran Mullan

Committee stage
Monday 7th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

I rise to speak in support of amendment 64. Economic crime is an issue that should always have the attention and concern of this House. It is theft on a grand scale, and often supports criminal networks and enterprises that are guilty of a much wider range of crimes, including violence, trafficking, drug dealing and all manner of actions that leave a trail of human suffering. These crimes may be committed in far-away places or have been committed in the distant past, which may go some way to explain why, to date, tackling this problem globally has not had the support it needs. However, we are considering this Bill in a changed world, where the human consequences of one major source of this kind of activity are plain for everyone to see.

Putin’s corrupt, criminal regime is waging war on the innocent population of Ukraine with absolute barbarity, almost certainly committing numerous war crimes. We have all seen the horrendous images of families lying dead on the street, shelled as they tried to flee during what was supposed to be a ceasefire. We have all seen the reckless assault on nuclear facilities and the apparent use of cluster bombs and indiscriminate weaponry in civilian areas, but we have also all seen the incredible bravery and patriotism of the Ukrainian people, with hundreds of thousands of volunteers from all walks of life picking up arms and fighting and dying for their country.

We can be proud of what we have done to help these people. We were the first country to supply lethal arms to them; we have trained more than 20,000 of their soldiers; and we joined the United States in doing our absolute best to warn the world about what was going to happen, often in the face of strong criticism. While these people are fighting for themselves and their country, they are also fighting for us. They are on the frontline of a battle that will decide whether the world order that has kept us safe for decades is upended. I understand why getting directly involved in this conflict could lead to much wider suffering and conflict, but because we are letting others fight and die on our behalf, it is incumbent on us to do everything else we possibly can to help them.

I want to challenge the impression that people who have heard today’s debates in the House and listened to the media may have received: that somehow, London and the UK have been uniquely susceptible to the finance that has been flowing from the Putin regime. This issue predates Putin. The transfer of the wealth of the Russian people to private individuals took place in the 1990s. That was the source of all this money, and every company, Government and individual that has had dealings with Russia since then has been tainted by it.

I am afraid there is plenty of blame to go around. It was the Labour party that introduced the tier 1 visa, which seems to have been one of the ways in which this country has been exploited. I remind Members that the Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, said at an EU-Russia investment conference he chaired that increasing reliance on Russian oil and gas was not something to be concerned about. A number of former Labour Prime Ministers and Members of the Lords have received handsome fees for speaking at Russian investment summits. Furthermore, Labour and Liberal Democrat Members argued against some parts of the original legislation in 2018 as too enabling of Ministers, with the shadow spokesperson saying that it contained excessive powers and was

“not justified by the need for speed”.—[Official Report, 1 May 2018; Vol. 640, c. 239.]

These oligarchs’ property empires are spread around the world, in Paris, New York, the French riviera and Berlin. If Members look at the media, they will see politicians from most of those capital cities identifying that they have been too lax on this issue for many years. Representatives of America’s justice system suggest that billions of pounds-worth of properties are hidden in New York limited liability companies.

As a financial centre of global importance and a high-value property market, it is not surprising that London seems to be a focal point for these oligarchs and their stolen wealth. While I accept things should have happened sooner, I question whether the world would have acted in the same way with us. There would be little point in cracking down on shell property ownership in London if all of it just fled to New York, Berlin and other capitals, so I caution against some of the self-righteousness we have heard from the Opposition.

The whole of the west has been too slow to act, and we can see we are all paying a price for that now. Every time we dealt with this regime’s puppets, we strengthened Putin. Every time Europe allowed its energy dependency to grow, we strengthened Putin. Whether it was behind closed doors, or in plain sight when they proceeded with the plans for Nord Stream 2, we know that ultimately that money and those projects date back to a corrupt, criminal regime that stole its funding from the Russian people.

In the end, authoritarian regimes get worse and worse—they always do. They are especially likely to do so in modern times, now that we have a modern surveillance state that makes it very difficult for the people to challenge or dislodge the regime. I welcome this Bill, and I welcome the spirit of the House generally in getting this legislation pushed through, even if at times I feel that people have been using it to make party political points.

I welcome the explanations we had from the Minister on Second Reading about a further Bill being drafted to tackle some of the wider issues, such as false declarations. It is right that we are focusing on the priority we have now, but that is a wider and bigger bit of work. I also draw Ministers’ attention to the challenge our enforcement agencies will have, and we must do more to help them. They can expect challenge in the courts. As others have said, the National Crime Agency and the Serious Fraud Office often face an onslaught of uneven legal competition whenever they proceed with any cases, and we can expect agencies such as Companies House to face the same. They can expect those supplying them with information to face legal attacks through the misuse of data protection laws.

We had a debate in this place on lawfare a few weeks ago that discussed strategic lawsuits against public participation, known as SLAPP. Those lawsuits go after not just journalists, but the kind of investigative companies that might help us tackle the huge task of proving who owns what. If we were already considering anti-SLAPP legislation, surely we need to put a rocket under that exercise to see whether there is more we can do. I know that the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) has tabled some amendments in that regard.

Capital flight is a key issue, as my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) has described, and I welcome the commitments that have been given at the Dispatch Box to ensure that the action we take is not too late, but there have been suggestions that we either shorten the time for registration or, as amendment 64 would do, put in place day one restrictions when it comes to the sale or transfer of assets during this transition period. The latter suggestion seems more proportionate and achievable, and I welcome the commitment from the Minister on delivering that.

I accept there may be challenges for Companies House and the Treasury in delivering on ambitious and wide-ranging changes to our approach. I understand that, and I do not say this lightly, but when it comes to making the commitments we should make to deliver on this, the resources we put into this task as a Government should reflect the seriousness of what is happening in Ukraine, with Putin determined to upend the global order. As the Prime Minister has said, we must do everything we can to ensure he fails. If we are asking the Ukrainians to fight and die for their democracy, and if the west has to answer for its role in failing to take action against the Putin regime for many, many years, it is the least we can do.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I am afraid I thought that was an utterly shabby little speech.

[Dr Mullan]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Member has only just spoken, so no, I am not going to give way. I think that speech was shabby, because it was partisan and completely inaccurate. Actually, many of us across the House were arguing for a very long time—all the way from 2010—for a proper sanctioning regime in this country. I think I personally asked different Prime Ministers 32 times for Magnitsky sanctions, and I was delighted when the Government introduced that legislation in 2018. I worked closely with the right hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab) to try to secure that, and I was delighted when he became the Justice Secretary, because I know he cares about this issue, and I have worked with him on it for many, many years.

Some of us argued for many, many years that it was wrong to have tier 1 visas doled out to people from authoritarian regimes around the world, including China and Russia, without asking any proper questions about where the money had come from that they supposedly had to invest in the UK. The levels were £2 million and £10 million. If someone had £10 million, they could get their permanent right to remain in the UK fast-tracked, and they could end up with UK citizenship. I think that has led to greater corruption of the British state, so it is absolutely disgraceful that an hon. Member should come to the House today and try to blame the Opposition for not introducing legislation when we were not in Government.

[Dr Mullan]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

No, I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman. I remind him what happened on 1 May 2018 when we debated the remaining stages of the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018. We voted on whether to introduce—guess what?—an economic crime Bill to bring forward a public register of the ownership of properties. Conservative Members all voted against that and the Opposition voted in favour, so I will not take any lectures from him on that.

I care passionately about the issue because we are facing an absolutely critical moment. None of us elected as MPs in this generation thought that we would see the elected Mayor of a town gunned down by Russian mercenaries when giving out aid in a democratic society, as Yuri Prylypko, Mayor of Hostomel, was today; none of us thought that we would see the Russian Government bombing refugees when there was meant to be a ceasefire; and none of us thought that we would see ceasefires repeatedly ignored day after day, so timeliness is all today. This is not really emergency legislation—it is just long overdue—but it is timely and important. In fact, I suggest that the amendments that the Government have tabled are more important than the material in the original Bill.

What depresses me is how many Putin-related Russian oligarchs and people with large assets in the UK have still yet to condemn the invasion of Ukraine. It is an absolutely deafening silence. It shames all of us that we have sanctioned only 11 oligarchs so far, or perhaps 17 individuals—there are different ways of counting it; it depends who we count as an oligarch—whereas the United States of America and the European Union have done far more.

In the Foreign Affairs Committee this afternoon, the Foreign Secretary tried to blame me for not having done enough. It was all my fault because apparently I had said something that she had to subsequently retract because it turned out that that was not true and I had not said it at all. She has apologised. The point is that everything that we are doing today should have been done in 2018, so we are genuinely frustrated.

We are seeking transparency about who owns what. The Bill does a substantial amount of that, of course, but we also want that to be enforced. There is a major problem that Companies House cannot even question whether the information that it has been provided with is accurate. If someone looks up a director on the Companies House website, it says that it cannot verify whether the information is correct. We want to go that step further and it seems bizarre not to include that in the Bill, which is why there are amendments about that.

We want individuals to be sanctioned. The measure that the Minister has introduced has gone some considerable way to making that easier, but I still do not understand why we made it so difficult in the first place. We also want the seizure of assets. There is not much point in sanctioning people if it will not have any effect. That is also extremely timely and must happen rapidly because of all the things that we have said about asset flight.

My anxiety is that without new clause 29 we are not doing that last part at all. My guess is that if we have to wait for the Government to introduce further legislation, that will not happen until after the Queen’s Speech sometime in May, so it will not go through both Houses for another six months. If we leave things that long, we will do exactly what we did in 2014 over Crimea: the moment will have passed and we will forget. Our memories will be short, another issue will come along and Putin will have won.

That is why I have tabled four simple amendments. Amendments 24 and 25 say that when someone registers or updates the register of beneficial ownership, they simply have to say whether any of the individuals that they are referring to are sanctioned individuals. That is important because it means that the people who are doing the registering have to check whether they are sanctioned individuals. We might think that they would want to do that anyway, but forcing them to do it means that, when they then register incorrectly, they are committing the offence, rather than the sanctioned individual. That is why that is important.

Local Contact Tracing

Debate between Chris Bryant and Kieran Mullan

Wednesday 14th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

I welcome the opportunity to take part in this important debate.

Effective contact tracing is going to help us to tackle this virus, and all of us here want the best possible version of that tool in the toolbox. The question is how best we do that. Despite what the Opposition might have people believe, there are no easy answers to this problem. It is easy to stand up in this place or go on TV and say, “Fix it”, but anyone with any real-world experience of organising any kind of project or undertaking that is even a fraction of the scale and size of this one understands the incredible challenges that are inevitably faced. Over recent months, the Government have built a huge testing regime capable of processing 340,000 tests a day that has tested over 7 million people in a matter of months. At the start of this epidemic, the yardstick for all this was Germany. Now that we are testing more people than Germany, France, Italy and Denmark, and many others, that yardstick has quietly disappeared.

Yes, there are challenges. Supply and demand are not uniform across the country and supply needs to be increased, but, whatever Labour Members think about the Government’s approach to testing and tracing, if they describe testing 69% as a complete failure, what does that say about the Welsh Labour Government’s programme? To be brutally honest, I am struggling to understand what exactly Labour Members are trying to say today, beyond of course, “We could have done it differently. It would all have been different and fantastic, and nothing would have gone wrong.” That is basically their position on everything to do with the coronavirus.

Let us talk about some of Labour Members’ common criticisms. They say we should not have the private sector involved, and that there is insufficient capacity. At the same time as criticising the Government for not having enough testing capacity, they are telling them that they should immediately and drastically cut out a chunk of that capacity because it does not suit their ideology. This is all based on their blinkered mentality that if the private sector does something it will automatically be bad and if the public sector does something it will automatically be good.

That brings me to the question of whether doing everything locally would have been the right approach at the outset of the programme. I simply do not accept that asking all 152 directors of public health to go off and set up their own approach at the outset would have been in any way feasible. Were they all supposed to come up with their own laboratories, their own contracts and their own apps? That just is not a credible solution in the short term. It was common sense to begin with a central programme, although even at the outset, when it was clear that something centrally driven was needed to kickstart the process, the Government recognised that local systems had a role to play. Many months before Labour was calling for it, £300 million was provided to help local authorities to develop their own test and trace programmes and, importantly, we have now 93 local authority test and trace regimes up and running.

So what is it that Labour Members are saying? Is it that we should immediately hand over everything that is being run nationally to local authorities?

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

No.

[Dr Mullan]

Well, it is.

Many of us in this place who have had dealings with local authorities—as well as lots of our constituents and probably millions of people across the country—would agree that getting everything done by the local authority is by no means a guarantee of success. Just this morning, in news that I am sure was greeted with groans in the Labour Whips Office, it was revealed that Birmingham City Council’s local programme dropped off 25 used swab kits to homes in Selly Oak. Does that mean that local authorities are incapable of delivering? No, of course not. We have problems in the private sector, and that should not bar them from involvement, and we have problems in the public sector too.

Local authority solutions are not a magic bullet. The quality of leadership, management and organisation varies enormously among local authorities. We all know this, and the Opposition know it. At the election, so many bricks in their red wall fell because residents were fed up not just with Labour at national level but with inept, Labour-led local authorities. After decades in power, they were taking people for granted, with leaders and councillors who were not even up to the job of taking away the bins on time, let alone organising a test and trace programme. The national programme inevitably has challenges, but do Labour Members really think that each and every one of the local authorities will deliver on this flawlessly?

Local leaders are political. Sadly, time and again we see Members on the Opposition Benches putting politics first. In the past 24 hours alone, they have said that they support local lockdowns but then did not vote for local lockdowns; that national lockdowns were a disaster, but now they want a national lockdown—and they cannot even make up their minds whether they want a two-week or a three-week lockdown. And they want the country to believe that if they had been in charge, all this would have been going smoothly. That is not accurate. When it came to getting children back to school, the national Labour party was kowtowing to national union leaders and doing what they said, and we all know that the local Labour parties are just as likely to be influenced by the unions. I absolutely recognise that there is work that needs to be done, but I am afraid the idea that if we just flick a switch and give it all to local authorities everything will be fine is complete and utter nonsense.