Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Debate between David Davis and Stephen Kinnock

Report stage
Wednesday 25th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

I am going to be brief and speak simply to new clauses 1 and 2, which stand in the name of the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), in my name and in the names of a number of other long-standing defenders of justice in Britain. The new clauses, in effect, make SLAPPs near impossible where they are used to protect economic crime. The provisions are far too narrow, by the way, but that is what the Bill demands. I will leave it to him to explain the mechanism, but I want to talk for a couple of minutes about how important this is and how we got to where we are today.

The issue dates back to about 2000, or perhaps a bit earlier, when London had become liberalised and the Putin oligarchs and others, including some Chinese people, were looking for places to hide their ill-gotten gains and behaviour. London was a wonderful target for that. There were vast flows of money in which they could hide the billions they were stealing from the Russian people and others.

At the time, there was pretty slapdash corporate admin—we were talking about that yesterday in respect of Companies House—and, I say this quite brutally, the complete feebleness of the British establishment, by which I mean everybody: both parties; and the agencies tasked with controlling this, the Serious Fraud Office, which has been a waste of space, and the NCA, which has not been good enough. It was created to tackle this but has not been good enough. All those things were happening. I say to the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) on the Opposition Front Bench that it goes wider than the Conservative party. It starts with Blair/Brown and goes on to Cameron/ Osborne. All of them made mistakes. The golden visa that the hon. Gentleman talked about was created just as we were rushing into the collapse of western financial capitalism under the previous Government. We were too soft—

[Stephen Kinnock]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. I agree that the creation of the scheme was under the new Labour Administration, but the point I made in my speech was that a number of those golden visas were given after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. He is right that successive Governments are guilty of naivety and complacency, but there is a point in 2014 when we really needed a different approach.

[Mr Davis]

There is no doubt that the more recent you are, the more salient the case. Frankly, I can remember being ashamed of a British Prime Minister hosting Putin at the Olympics only a few years after Litvinenko was murdered in our country in the most cruel and overt act of state terrorism. Neither Government dealt with that. Cameron’s action was grotesque in the extreme, but neither Government dealt with it. Similarly, both Governments kowtowed to China after Tibet and all the rest of it. That has been done too many times. It is the entire system, not just one Government or another.

London is a fabulously attractive place for the Russians or the Chinese. If you want to be somewhere else than Russia, this is the place to be. We have facilitated that at every turn. Here comes the issue to which SLAPPs relate. We have a legal system that is probably the most brilliant in the world in delivering fair outcomes and good justice, but it is also phenomenally expensive, which means it is one-sided in its operation between an oligarch and an ordinary citizen, journalist or whoever they may be.

In conjunction with that are the things that flow from it, such as the behaviour of solicitors, to some of whom my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), who is not in his place, gave a fair old pasting yesterday, but one that was deserved. The private investigators industry, unregulated, undertakes crimes to gather information for use as weapons against other people. Our courts—not uniquely, but outstandingly—allow that information to be used. In each individual case that might be the right decision, but the collective effect of that is to suck criminally based information into our system and therefore engender and help the industry.

All that is why new clause 1 and 2 are vital. That all had the effect of creating a vast, possibly unintentional institutional cover-up for criminal activity: money laundering, fraud and concealment of evil actions abroad. Let us bear in mind that some of the oligarchs we are talking about are murderers. The system murders people. It is evil activity. That is why new clauses 1 and 2 are incredibly important.

What the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill is proposing in new clauses 1 and 2 is a second best option. We already heard the best option in earlier interventions: a freestanding Bill immediately, because this is happening now. There are court cases going on as I stand here in which people are having their lives destroyed by SLAPPs. The next best is to have it in the Bill of Rights, but we know that that is way down the timetable, for all sorts of reasons. We may not see it before the next election, in which case we will have lost two more years.

The new clauses amount to a way of dealing with this criminal—or near criminal—activity in a way that is not susceptible to a finely turned piece of law. I listened with fascination to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) on that point. Getting that right is difficult; getting this right is not, because the greatest enemy of evil is a free press. In our country in the last couple of decades we have allowed our free press to become gagged and crippled. If we can take that gag away and remove those bonds, we will suddenly expose all the things that we need to deal with. We will see the weaknesses I talked about—the SFO and the NCA—and put them right, one by one. That is why we should support new clauses 1 and 2. I talked before about the weaknesses of the SFO and the NCA. We will see those weaknesses and we will put them right, one by one. That is why we should support this measure today.

Lawfare and UK Court System

Debate between David Davis and Stephen Kinnock

Thursday 20th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

My hon. Friend alights upon a very important point. It is very clear that some London-based law firms have found an incredibly profitable niche that they are willing to pursue without too much concern about the outcome. I think the professional bodies for those law firms should be looking very hard at them, as should the Government. It is an important point, which I am sure others will develop.

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech. On the point of the lawyers who are facilitating all this—the army of lawyers doing the dirty work of the Russian Government and of oligarchs and the Governments of other hostile regimes—does he agree that were we to introduce a foreign agents registration Act in this country, lawyers acting on behalf of those people should be included in such a registration process?

Elections Bill

Debate between David Davis and Stephen Kinnock

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

The point I would make is that I am quoting from Government research. I did not do this research; it is Government research. By the way, since my hon. Friend draws me to Government research, Lord Pickles, a real old pal of mine, did a study on this. I have read it and, to summarise, the conclusion was, “I can find no evidence of personation but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, and of course even if it isn’t happening now it might well happen in the future.” It is the precautionary principle gone mad in the centre of our constitution.

The Government answer, as we have heard several times, is free photographic ID. Nevertheless, the Government’s own research again found that about 42% of people without the ID would not take it up. That is really very serious. These groups are going to be disenfranchised because they do not take it up, and they will turn up at the polling station and find that they are unable to vote. This is in pursuit of three convictions.

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech thoroughly destroying the Government case for voter ID. Would he care to hazard a guess as to why the Government are pursuing this policy?

[Mr Davis]

This is where I differ from the hon. Gentleman. I think that the Government are trying to do their best. I do not think that this is a deliberate action, but I think that the pressure on the Government—[Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman laughs, but listen: I lived through a Labour Government deliberately gerrymandering the system, frankly, so I do not want to take any lectures on that. I think that the Government are trying to do their best. They have the wrong idea in pursuit of a problem that does not exist, but they are nevertheless trying to do their best. But there is a greater—