Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [ Lords ] (Sixth sitting)

Debate between Hannah Bardell and Anneliese Dodds

Tuesday 6th March 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Hannah Bardell]

Does the hon. Lady agree that we are letting our citizens down if we do not legislate properly and close these loopholes? I am sure we have all had constituency cases where people have lost money to unscrupulous companies and company owners. We have an opportunity to take action, and we must take it. The Government are letting citizens down if they do not accept the new clauses.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making the point clearly that our proposal has been portrayed as only a burden, when it could help to prevent our constituents from being ripped off by unscrupulous individuals who are able to set themselves up as a company with only minimum requirements for due diligence. As I said, they can be there by day, fly off by night, and leave the unfortunate person who dealt with that company in a very difficult position.

To end my remarks specifically on the Minister’s comments on new clause 13, many of us are worried that, in practice, there are TCSPs that offer UK company formation with a range of optional services, including setting up bank accounts in other jurisdictions such as Latvia, Belize, Switzerland and Cyprus. That would not necessarily be a problem, were it not for the fact that, time and again, we have seen in the cases we have discussed in this Committee that reliance on the third parties—the banks in those other countries—does not lead to a real assurance that money laundering provisions are being followed. The reality is quite the opposite.

In the Russian laundromat scandal, which we have already talked about, of the 440 UK shell companies used in the scheme—in itself, a staggering statistic—392 of them had Baltic bank accounts, with 270 UK firms using Latvian banks and 122 using banks in Estonia. It may be that we are fully confident in every case that anti-money laundering regulations were followed in those countries, but given some of what came out of the Russian laundromat scandal, it could be suggested that that is not the case.

We do need to get at this problem through another route. We need reform of the Companies House system, but we also need the use of another prong, which is requiring a UK bank account.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.

Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [Lords] (Sixth sitting)

Debate between Hannah Bardell and Anneliese Dodds

Tuesday 6th March 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Hannah Bardell]

Does the hon. Lady agree that we are letting our citizens down if we do not legislate properly and close these loopholes? I am sure we have all had constituency cases where people have lost money to unscrupulous companies and company owners. We have an opportunity to take action, and we must take it. The Government are letting citizens down if they do not accept the new clauses.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making the point clearly that our proposal has been portrayed as only a burden, when it could help to prevent our constituents from being ripped off by unscrupulous individuals who are able to set themselves up as a company with only minimum requirements for due diligence. As I said, they can be there by day, fly off by night, and leave the unfortunate person who dealt with that company in a very difficult position.

To end my remarks specifically on the Minister’s comments on new clause 13, many of us are worried that, in practice, there are TCSPs that offer UK company formation with a range of optional services, including setting up bank accounts in other jurisdictions such as Latvia, Belize, Switzerland and Cyprus. That would not necessarily be a problem, were it not for the fact that, time and again, we have seen in the cases we have discussed in this Committee that reliance on the third parties—the banks in those other countries—does not lead to a real assurance that money laundering provisions are being followed. The reality is quite the opposite.

In the Russian laundromat scandal, which we have already talked about, of the 440 UK shell companies used in the scheme—in itself, a staggering statistic—392 of them had Baltic bank accounts, with 270 UK firms using Latvian banks and 122 using banks in Estonia. It may be that we are fully confident in every case that anti-money laundering regulations were followed in those countries, but given some of what came out of the Russian laundromat scandal, it could be suggested that that is not the case.

We do need to get at this problem through another route. We need reform of the Companies House system, but we also need the use of another prong which is requiring a UK bank account.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.

Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [Lords] (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Hannah Bardell and Anneliese Dodds

Thursday 1st March 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Hannah Bardell]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on making an excellent speech. Will she join me in paying tribute to the former Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, our colleague Roger Mullin, who did a huge amount of work on this? Will she acknowledge as well that despite their name—Scottish limited partnerships —these companies have little to do with Scotland? They were introduced by the UK Government under Liberal Chancellor Herbert Asquith in 1907. The operation, regulation and dissolution of SLPs remain exclusively the preserve of Westminster, so it is vital that this legislation goes through and the changes happen.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am very grateful to the hon. Lady for bringing those matters to light; I will return to the point about this being a UK Government responsibility later, because it is enormously important. It is important to raise our recognition of those who have done so much to uncover what has been occurring with SLPs. I also pay tribute to The Herald newspaper, which has done a good investigative job in this regard, and I know that Labour’s Jackie Baillie has expressed her concern about Scotland’s name being used potentially to enable offshore tax arrangements and worse. It is important that we look at these arrangements.

Also related to the hon. Lady’s comment, there is huge concern that the unfortunate link between the name SLP and Scotland itself is potentially darkening Scotland’s name. I understand that there is an advertisement that is run on a Belarus TV station, Varyag, saying,

“A company operating in the UK does not need to register with the tax authorities and is therefore automatically freed from any tax payments on an absolutely legal basis. Having registered a company in Scotland, by using offshore rules, you do not need to carry out any audits and, furthermore, there is no requirement to provide financial reports.”

The TV station stressed the kudos of Scotland and the fact that it is part of Britain:

“As a result of Scotland being part of the United Kingdom it does not fall in to the black list of offshore zones”,

presumably meaning either the OECD blacklist or the EU blacklist.

I will briefly mention a couple of specific cases where SLPs have been shown to be problematic, before looking at the current legal context, why this is a UK Government responsibility, and why we require Government to act and hopefully to accept our amendment. The first, which is very worrying, is the Moldovan case. According to the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, in November 2014 $1 billion was reported to have gone missing from three Moldovan banks. Hon. Members will know that Moldova is not a well-off country—quite the opposite: although it is one of the most beautiful countries in Europe, it is one of the poorest. The corruption that was revealed in that case was enormously damaging for that nation, which has many governance challenges. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund suspended financial aid to it after revelations about what had occurred in that siphoning off. Two companies registered on Brunswick Street in Edinburgh—a street I know well, as I am sure others do, too—kept coming up in the records for the case, which has had such a significant impact on that nation.

Another example that is commonly adduced in this regard is the Ukrainian one. A Lancashire-based firm called Fuerteventura Inter, which sounds rather like a football team, appears to have been used as an SLP. It was created in February 2015, and was used to siphon off funds from the sale of cannon shells to the United Arab Emirates. The SLP was an intermediary in that deal. The prosecutors allege that it enabled officials to take a large slice of the value of that contract.

Then there is the Azerbaijani laundromat, which I will come back to later. I am sure colleagues have heard of it, and I am sure we will hear a lot more about it in our discussions next Tuesday. “The Global Laundromat” was a piece of investigative journalism that looked into Russian money being laundered through different shell companies. That was going on until 2014. More recently, an investigation of Azerbaijani companies that came out in 2017 showed how companies including SLPs appear to have been used to hide the real ownership of payments.

This is not just about stealing from very poor people; it is about political influence. Some of the payments from the Azerbaijani laundromat were going to individuals who sit on Council of Europe working groups, including those involved in producing reports about human rights in Azerbaijan. Of course, many of the individuals involved have rejected any accusation that those funds had any influence on them. We will draw our own conclusions from looking at the paperwork and what has been said legally about that matter.

[Hannah Bardell]

I declare an interest: I represent my party in the Council of Europe. I spoke to some activists from Belarus, who raised that issue with me and talked about the damage and devastation it is causing in their country. That again highlights why this is so very important.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that issue. It is particularly important that highly respected international bodies are above any insinuation or reproach. It may be that there has been confusion and a lack of knowledge about the provenance of some of those funds, but we need to remove from the system any opacity that could give that impression.

Operation Car Wash, which came up only last month—it is funny that all of these cases use the washing metaphor, but it is clearly because they are about washing out the provenance of money—covered Brazil and Peru. A giant construction firm in those countries paid £1 billion in bribes for, it appears, political purposes, and it appears that some of the payments went through SLPs. When we look at the evidence, we see we need to have a far stronger grip on this problem.

In early summer last year, legislation was introduced by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to try to regulate SLPs, under which they were to be forced to disclose their beneficial owners within the next 28 days or face daily fines. I am concerned that we still do not know how many such firms have genuinely indicated their beneficial owners—I hope we will hear from the Minister on that now. I am not privy to information on how many fines have been levied, and most commentators suggest that not a single business has been prosecuted. Perhaps some have been fined but not prosecuted. Perhaps we can find out more about that.

The Opposition are concerned that more action needs to be taken. To return to our earlier exchange, it is important that the UK Government take responsibility, because they have reserved powers over Scots corporate law. The Scottish Government have asked the UK Government to act, and it appears that previous actions to require more ownership information may not have gone far enough. I hope the Minister will enlighten us on that and support our amendment.