Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill (Fourth sitting) Debate

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Department: Home Office

Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill (Fourth sitting)

Liam Byrne Excerpts
Thursday 27th October 2022

(2 years, 1 month ago)

Public Bill Committees
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None Portrait The Chair
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Thank you very much. I will first call Liam Byrne.

Liam Byrne Portrait Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
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Q 213 Thank you, Ms Bardell. Starting with you, Angela—thank you so much for coming to give evidence. First, what are the perceptions around the world of London, in particular, as a centre for money laundering? How serious a problem do people abroad think that we have here?

Angela Foyle: Publicly, it is stated that London is one of the key capitals of money, but that is partly because it is the largest financial centre in the world, so you will inevitably have dirty money flowing through. There is that view. It is something that the US, in particular, has made comment on at times. On the other hand, when talking to Europeans, we are also recognised as being at the forefront of introducing legislation in relation to money laundering regulations and enforcing them, to some extent, compared with other jurisdictions. It is a bit of a mixed bag, depending on who you are talking to and in what context.

Liam Byrne Portrait Liam Byrne
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Q You used the word inevitable in your answer. Is it inevitable that there will be lots of dirty money on the scale we have flying through London today?

Angela Foyle: I think what I meant by that is that it is inevitable that you will have some illicit finance where there are significant movements of finance. I am not saying it is good—I think it is wrong. I think we should stop it to the greatest extent that we can, but where do you hide a tree? It would be in a wood. So, where are you going to hide dirty money? It is going to be somewhere where an awful lot of money is flowing through.

It is not that I think it is a positive thing at all; I think it is very negative. I actually spend most of my working life trying to see how we can prevent accountants and others—I have forgotten the word I mean—unknowingly getting involved with it. It is a problem for London that we have to be acutely conscious of, and therefore we have a greater responsibility, in many ways.

Liam Byrne Portrait Liam Byrne
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Thank you—that is well put. Mike, what is your view on that?

Mike Miller: I agree with Angela. London is such a large financial centre and there is such a volume of money moving through it that there inevitably will be, as Angela said, some money that is not well sourced and not well processed. That being said, we work very hard, particularly at ICAEW, to try to clamp down on it. Illicit finance and illicit transfer of funds affect the profession particularly badly. They put people in a very difficult position, both reputationally and legally. You will find the vast majority of chartered accountants and other professionals do not want to engage in unprofessional and malicious practice when it comes to that finance. We work very proactively with Committees, Parliament and across Government to make our representations about how this can be more effectively countered.

Liam Byrne Portrait Liam Byrne
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Q Angela, we heard evidence on Tuesday from UK Finance that it was concerned that the verification regime proposed in the Bill is much weaker than the regime used across the AML regulated sector. What is your view on that? Are you worried that a two-tier verification regime is emerging here?

Angela Foyle: It is interesting, because we would probably put it the other way around. The standard—sorry, I beg your pardon, I was thinking about the earlier Bill. Yes, this Bill has two forms of verification, by either Companies House or authorised corporate service providers. It does not appear to have the wording that would be in the money laundering regulations, which requires there to be reasonable verification measures using a risk-based approach. I think those kinds of words always assist, so that you actually have to assess and understand the risk surrounding the people you are trying to verify first, and therefore, if necessary, enhance your level of verification.

Liam Byrne Portrait Liam Byrne
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Q Do you think that is a weakness in the Bill that we should think about strengthening?

Angela Foyle: Around verification, yes. There is a spectrum, however. Requiring that someone has to verify, that is, prove, that that is true goes beyond what is possible for an accountant. I can look at documents. I can take careful measures to ensure that those documents are, or appear to be, valid, but I cannot actually ever say with 100% certainty that x is x; I can simply say that I have done the following work and, based on that, these are reasonable measures on the risk basis. I certainly think that is an area that could be, at the very least, clarified as to the standards expected to ensure that they are consistent.

Liam Byrne Portrait Liam Byrne
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Q That is very useful. Finally, the folks from Lloyds bank, and others, described how easy it is to move money through a network of banks and then consolidate it into a final bank, from which bad people may take their money out. We were worried about the way in which proxies in particular could be used by bad people to help with this kind of mechanism. In the Bill, we have a definition of “person with significant control”, which is someone with about 25%. Is that too high?

Angela Foyle: It is based on the Financial Action Task Force standards on beneficial ownership, which looks to people who own 25% or more, in some cases, or more than 25% in others. It is one of those challenging issues because, in relation to things such as proxies, often it is not the about the levels that a person owns, it is the fact that x purports to be the person who holds it, when actually they actually do so on behalf on y, which can be very difficult to track through.

Many people look below 25% in any event just to make sure. Particularly with sanctions, they will have a look there. But 25% is a global norm and changing it might cause other challenges. This is the question: are you satisfied that you understand who the people that you are dealing with are, and who is behind them, at all times? It is not necessarily a question of whether it should be 20%, 5% or 25%. It is a hard one for me to answer because I work with 25%, but I will generally have a good look around to see what else there is.

Alison Thewliss Portrait Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
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Q In your evidence to the Committee, you said that you wanted Ministers to amend the legislation to ensure that accountancy firms are in the scope for indirect information-sharing provisions. Will you tell us a bit more about why that is important?

Mike Miller: Indirect information provision essentially relates to a third-party database which would allow the easier sharing of information between financial firms. The ones that are already mentioned include banks, crypto exchanges and various different entities that could be privy to malicious financial movements, essentially. The accountancy sector has not been included in that, so for the purposes of a lot of the work that we are doing about the open sharing of information with law enforcement, between bodies, between other firms, it would be helpful for the streamlined moving of information. It would certainly help accountancy firms to identify more quickly, and thus reduce the likelihood of, any bad transactions taking place. An accountancy firm could avoid getting embroiled in things it does not wish to get embroiled in if it had pre-emptive access to any intelligence—that may have been discovered by a bank, for example, looking in more detail at specific financial transactions than accountancy firms tend to—that indicated that it should not be doing business with particular entities.

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Baroness Hodge of Barking Portrait Dame Margaret Hodge
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Q You give advice on what makes good supervision.

Peter Swabey: We give advice on what is good governance for organisations, not on the supervisory role.

Liam Byrne Portrait Liam Byrne
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Q I want to pursue that point for a moment. In the interests of good governance, would it not make sense to strengthen some of the obligations on directors to include, for example, a duty to take steps to prevent corruption in their organisations? We have similar measures on corruption; we do not have similar measures on economic crime and fraud.

Peter Swabey: You have the directors’ duties under section 171 of the Companies Act and so on. Those are there, but it is difficult to identify exactly how those directors’ duties can be pursued against any defaulting director. For me, that is one of the challenges. Were you to introduce something extra on that, that would be a solution, but again you would need to look at how that could actually be enforced.

Tom Tugendhat Portrait Tom Tugendhat
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Q It is nice to see you, Mr Swabey. May I ask specifically about the governance aspect, which is your area? Accountability is fundamental to governance. You cannot hold people to account for things that they are not responsible for, or likewise the reverse. Will you touch a little on how you see that improving—not just the accountability in financial transparency, and all the anti-money laundering and various other aspects we have spoken about, but the ability to hold companies to account for other governance areas, whether those are corporate social responsibility, clean-up, environmental or many others?

Peter Swabey: The Bill deals with some very specific issues, which are not necessarily those. I think that the Bill would need to be broadened significantly were it going to get into things like sustainability, corporate social responsibility and so on.

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None Portrait The Chair
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Thank you very much.

Liam Byrne Portrait Liam Byrne
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Q Catherine, I think I speak for all of us in saluting you for the courage you have shown in revealing what you have revealed. How important was it to President Putin that people around him—his friends and allies—were able to move money so easily out of Russia through UK corporate structures?

Catherine Belton: I think this has become a key way in which the Putin regime is able to extend its soft power and influence and undermine our democracies. That is very clear, because you can have vast flows of pretty much untraceable money, especially in the case of LLPs. Once it goes through a UK LLP, no one has any clue where any of that cash has gone. Vladimir Putin believes that the weakness of the west lies in our incessant drive for profits and the belief that the more Russian cash there is in the UK, the more Russia will have to follow our corporate governance standards.

Unfortunately, there has been a great lack of corporate governance standards, which has allowed our system to be corrupted. It has really laid bare how powerless some of our oversight bodies and enforcement agencies are. You only have to look at the National Crime Agency’s investigation into the source of the donation that Arron Banks gave to the Brexit campaign to see just how feeble our institutions are, at a time when we really need to be empowering them. When the NCA had to look for the source of the £8 million, it could not go any further than the Isle of Man company co-owned by Arron Banks. We do not know where the money came from.

Liam Byrne Portrait Liam Byrne
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Q Let me just crystallise this. Are you saying that allies of President Putin used UK corporate structures to move money out of Russia?

Catherine Belton: Yes, I am, of course. Obviously, that has an agenda, especially when the UK Parliament’s own Intelligence and Security Committee has pointed out the very close links between Russian business, the Russian state and Russian intelligence. Basically, Russian businesses very often have to act as arms of the Kremlin or follow Kremlin orders. Russian businessmen have to follow Kremlin orders in order to hold on to their wealth. It is not just money that is coming into our system and making everyone rich; it is money with an agenda, and that agenda can be to undermine our democracy.

Liam Byrne Portrait Liam Byrne
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Q I do not know whether you can see it, but the Bill is called the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill. How credible do you think corporate transparency in this country will be if we do not amend the Bill to include the protection of journalists like you, who have worked so hard and bravely to reveal the truth only to face legal action in English courts that sought to silence you?

Catherine Belton: I think it will be half-baked if it does not include that amendment. Obviously, it is great to have better laws, but when financial watchdogs, public oversight bodies and journalists are still unable to cast a light on some of the financial transactions of the super-rich, from fear of these crushing lawsuits, it means that you have a system that is only half working. Law enforcement relies, and has relied in the past, to a great degree on journalistic investigations, including for instance by the OCCRP; its reporting has led to some very important cases.

Baroness Hodge of Barking Portrait Dame Margaret Hodge
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Q I will ask one question, Catherine, because many have been asked. I join with others who have met you, or read your book, and are full of admiration for your courage. For those who have not, and do not know your story, will you quickly tell us what happened to you in relation to the SLAPPs, and why it is important that we try to tackle those in the Bill? You can do it very briefly; I am conscious of time.

Catherine Belton: I wrote a book called “Putin’s People”, which was about Putin’s rise to power, the continued role of the KGB and how Russia was using oligarchs—Russian businessmen—to further Russian influence in the world. I was writing precisely about how many of the oligarchs, such as Roman Abramovich, were essentially forced to act as arms of the Kremlin, because otherwise their wealth could be jeopardised. Putin’s hold on power was such that anybody who did not obey his orders could face jail or the seizure of their companies.

Abramovich was very upset when I suggested in the book, quoting three former associates, that he had acquired Chelsea football club on Putin’s orders, in order to acquire soft power and influence in the UK. That, I believe, was public interest reporting. The allegation had been put to his spokesperson, and the response was in the book. He announced that he was suing me personally and HarperCollins—a statement that was swiftly followed by lawsuits from three other Russian billionaires, and then one from the Kremlin oil company Rosneft. The cases were very difficult to grapple with, because there were so many of them all at the same time.

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Baroness Hodge of Barking Portrait Dame Margaret Hodge
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Q The Italians appear to have conquered this—I do not know if you know about that—through the stuff they have done on the mafia. The Canadians appear to have introduced a new power that might take them there. The Americans are trying to think about it. The Europeans are. There is quite a lot of thinking. I am just picking your brain. Is there anything you have done in this field that could add value as we try to think about it?

Professor Jason Sharman: I think not, and I think that the British Government, at least when it comes to sanctioning oligarch assets, which I realise are different from state assets, are in a bind. I think they will have to return those assets to the oligarchs and that they may have to pay damages to the oligarchs. That would be a terrible injustice, but I really worry about what the end game for sanctions is.

Liam Byrne Portrait Liam Byrne
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Q Jason, you are a political scientist. Why are we in this position where we have such weakness? Why has our political system failed to address these weaknesses for so long?

Professor Jason Sharman: This is probably a typical social science answer, but there are quite a few reasons that make it difficult, because no one corrective, in and of itself, is going to fix the situation. There have been solutions, such as the persons of significant control registry, the unexplained wealth orders and so on, where it has been like, “This is the thing that will unlock the problem”. But instead it is a combination. First off, it is appropriately difficult to take away people’s property. Secondly, the bureaucratic incentives do not favour it. You have this very risk-averse culture within law enforcement agencies. Thirdly, as I said, there is a failure to harness the incredible investigative resources that lie outside the state, in the not-for-profit sector but also in the for-profit sector.

None Portrait The Chair
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Before the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill asks his next question, I remind him that our line of questioning has to relate to the legislation in front of us. With his extensive parliamentary experience, I know that he will be able to do that.

Liam Byrne Portrait Liam Byrne
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Q I am grateful for those guard rails, Ms Bardell. At the moment, the Bill has a lacuna, which is any protections around safeguarding politicians from dirty money. We are not covered by suspicious activity reporting, for example. Some would argue that the £1.2 billion that has flown into British politics over the past 10 years from people with all kinds of motivations and ambitions may be one of the reasons that our political system has not acted hitherto to stop this corruption, and that should be something we fix in the Bill. What do you think about that?

Professor Jason Sharman: I think that, as Catherine Belton said earlier, certainly volumes of money into politics have something to do with it, but even if you could come up with a perfect solution to that problem, it may not actually make too much difference in terms of interdicting money laundering and corruption funds into this country. That is not to say it is not worth while doing, but there is this constant phase of saying, “If only we do x, we’ll really be able to fix the problem.” I think it is something where modest progress, incremental progress, is what we should expect, and we have to do lots of different things right in order to achieve that progress.

Liam Byrne Portrait Liam Byrne
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Q So it could be part of the solution.

Professor Jason Sharman: Yes.

None Portrait The Chair
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Thank you. I move finally to Tom Tugendhat.