Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill

Kim Johnson Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills), and I associate myself with his comments. Although, as the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) said, it has taken a war for us to get to this point, I find myself forgetting how often I go to other countries and speak to people there, or speak to family members who live abroad, who say how they look to this place for what should be best practice. Yet when it comes to tackling economic crime we have been lagging behind. The Secretary of State said that this was done speedily, and I am reminded of when I was a teacher and people used to stay up all night to do the homework I had set three weeks earlier. The Government could have done this better and sooner, and they did not, but we are here now.

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech. Does she agree that actions speak louder than words? We have had an awfully long time to get this right—it goes back to 2016—so let us see some action, and action now.

[Layla Moran]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, and she is right. I do not say this in any other spirit than one of wanting to help. I thank the Ministers for the ways in which they have engaged with us, and I will keep working constructively with the Government on this, because we need to get it right, and not just for the people of Ukraine. Before I came into the Chamber today, I was talking to some Russians in Russia. I cannot name them and will not do so, because if I did, it would put their lives in danger. Members will be aware that on Friday Putin put in place legislation to give them 15 years’ imprisonment for simply saying that Putin is waging a war, as opposed to an exercise or a peacekeeping mission. They describe what is happening as strict and cruel legislation designed for political oppression, and they are asking Members of this House to work with the Russian community here in the UK to get the message out through their networks and to their friends about things such as how to circumvent Putin’s internet clampdown in Russia in order to get the BBC in Russian to people on the ground. There is something that all of us can do to help those Russians who want to help us here, and who are desperate not to be tarred with the same brush.

I look forward to the Committee stage that will take place later this evening, so I shall be brief, but I would love to hear from the Minister what exactly will be in the economic crime Bill part 2, especially in relation to the Companies House reform that we seek. I also want to associate myself with what has been said about enforcement. When I asked doughty third-party groups such as Transparency International and the Royal United Services Institute why other countries—America, for instance—had managed to include far more companies and individuals on their lists, I was told, “They have fewer laws, but they enforce the hell out of them.” Can we please be a country that enforces the hell out of this and any further legislation that we might want to introduce?

We also want to ensure that the second Bill clamps down on enablers. Amendments have been tabled to that effect, but we know that stand-alone legislation will be required for this purpose. It is not just the lawyers who are involved; it is the PR firms, the accountants, the banks, and all the others who knew what they were doing. It should not be ‘a case of acting “recklessly”—there are some get-out clauses in this Bill that we need to be careful about—because those people knew or decided to turn a blind eye, and that can no longer be good enough. I appreciate that this cannot be covered in today’s Bill, but when will it be covered?

I look forward to working with the Minister in future iterations of these matters, and I especially look forward to the Committee stage, when we shall be able to discuss some of the holes in the Bill in more detail.