Elections Bill

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 17th January 2022 Commons Chamber

A boundary review is coming. Let’s face it: the public do not know very well what a constituency boundary means. I can demonstrate that perfectly in my constituency. Just on the bottom corner is Atherstone. While not in my constituency, everyone locally knows exactly where it is. Although it is thought of as part of where I represent in Bosworth, Leicestershire, were I to live there, my address would come up as North Warwickshire. That creates confusion when it comes to the people we are trying to represent. I simply urge the Government to consider the amendment, to bring something forward and to find a set of words that could easily allow us all to have that choice of representing in safety.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I rise to speak to new clause 16, in my name and that of Members from four of the parties represented here in Westminster. We tabled the new clause because the Bill has many flaws, but among the worst is the lack of any attempt to clean up the laundromat of British politics, which is now awash with dark money from dubious sources. We cannot in good conscience now pretend we are unaware. The Government can no longer plead ignorance or innocence: they are either careless or culpable and we in this House cannot tolerate the situation for a moment longer. That is why the amendments we are moving are so important.

Our Pandora amendments are simple. They would insist that party donations must come from profits made here in the UK, and they would establish a new regime that would allow the Electoral Commission to call in donations for an assessment on national security grounds. As it happens, the Government have just introduced precisely that regime for investments in critical national infrastructure. What infrastructure in this country could be more important than the essence of our democracy itself? We have heard warnings from Chatham House, the Intelligence and Security Committee and from Lord Evans this weekend that our system of party funding is now wide open.

We have heard and debated in this House the example of Mr Banks, Leave.EU and the mysterious source of his gigantic loans from Rock Services—or was it Rock Holdings? Thanks to evidence given to Carole Cadwalladr and the heroic reporting of The Guardian, we know that there are all kinds of interesting and no doubt innocent connections, such as the fact that Mr Banks’s wife, Katya Banks, was given entry into the country on a passport serially numbered to a passport given to someone who MI5 reported as a Russian spy. That is no doubt completely innocent, but the fact is that, when the National Crime Agency dropped its investigation into the source of the money, it left the source of the money shrouded in mystery. The Electoral Commission was so alarmed that it issued a warning that it could open the floodgates to donations from offshore.

Let me underline why the national security assessment is important to those on the Opposition Benches, but should be of importance to the Conservative party, too. Let us take another honourable donor, Mr Mohamed Amersi, a man who together with his partner has given nearly £800,000 to good causes and who, it would seem, might qualify for a walk-on part in John le Carré’s “The Night Manager”, but not as Jonathan Pine.

Information I have seen from well-placed sources in the Kremlin shows that Mr Amersi is an associate and business partner of people with all sorts of friends, including some with close connections to the SVR and FSB. They include Yuri Lopatinsky, Ernst Stauffer, and Aleksandr Barunin, with whom Mr Amersi worked on several telecom deals, including the takeover of Megafon, the firm later accused by the Georgians of

“illegal business operations and participation in the military and economic annexation of Georgia”.

Mr Amersi made a fortune helping to sell PeterStar to a Luxembourg-based company, which—surprise, surprise—turned out to controlled by Leonid Rieman, who was none other than President Putin’s former telecoms Minister. Coincidence? You be the judge, Mr Deputy Speaker.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend has made some excellent points. The chair of the Trade Union and Labour Party Liaison Organisation, Mick Whelan, has said that trade union money is the cleanest money in British politics, and, listening to my right hon. Friend’s speech, I think I can agree with him. Given that the Bill will make that more difficult, do we not begin to see a pattern forming?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is right and he will horrified to hear that there is more.

Perhaps the most concerning of Mr Amersi’s connections is Leonard Bogdan, a man with very interesting friends in the FSB and the SVR. Mr Bogdan was a minor partner in Tempbank, which held Soviet Union Communist party assets and then specialised in covert foreign transfers. The bank was associated with several Syrian citizens supplying arms to Syria and Iran and was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2014. But Tempbank also helped to facilitate another sanctioned firm, Hudsotrade, which dealt with Russian arms and ammunition suppliers. Sources inside the Russian Government say that Mr Amersi was involved in these deals, providing finance from Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, along with private clients from Syria and Iran, to help exports into the middle east. Mr Amersi, it is said, dealt directly with Hudsotrade and two of the shareholders, who were later sanctioned.

Despite those connections, however, correspondence that I have seen shows that Mr Amersi was asked to chair COMENA—Conservative Friends of Middle East and North Africa—a new political interface between the Conservative party and the middle east established

“on the authorisation of CCHQ”.

Mr Amersi says that he had a half-hour chat with officials from the Conservative party before writing his cheques, but on the basis of the evidence to which I have drawn attention today, I think we would all benefit from the Electoral Commission’s being empowered to call in donations for a national security audit. We have allowed this regime for donations and investments in critical national infrastructure; we now need to bring in that regime to clean up the laundromat of British political funding.

Time does not allow me to highlight further coincidences—

[Cat Smith]

Has my right hon. Friend read the transcript of our Committee hearings? I hope that the Minister has had a chance to read the Russia report, because it is imperative for all of us to be well aware of the security threats that face our democracy.

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The point is that I can raise questions here that warrant further investigation—questions about, for example, Lubov Chernukhin, the model of generosity who has given the Conservatives £2.1 million, £1.9 million of it after her husband Vladimir—the same Vladimir who was appointed by Mr Putin’s deputy chairman of Vnesheconombank—received money from Suleiman Kerimov. This was a man who was later sanctioned by the United States Treasury, and not only for being a Russian Government official: he was arrested in France for smuggling in hundreds of millions of euros in suitcases.

Then there is Mr Temerko, another honourable man, who has donated £1.2 million to the Conservative party. I am told that the Prime Minister’s whiff-whaff bats are on the wall of his reception room. The only slight issue is that Mr Temerko is the man who used to operate at the very top of the Russian arms industry, with connections high up in the Kremlin—but, of course, Mr Temerko is an honourable man. He works with another honourable man, Mr Fedotov, who is a key shareholder in Aquind Ltd, which, The Guardian reports, has donated £700,000 to the Conservative party, along with another firm. This is, unfortunately, the same Mr Fedotov who, according to the Pandora papers, has revealed that his fortune was made through an offshore financial structure in the mid-2000s, at about the time when it was alleged to have been siphoning funds from the Russian state pipeline company Transneft. But, of course, Mr Fedotov is an honourable man.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—