Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Debate between Liam Byrne and Clive Efford

Report stage
Wednesday 25th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Here we are, licensing a warlord to draw down funds and move them into the NatWest bank account of a London law firm to prosecute a case that undermines the sanctions we imposed on that warlord in the first place.

Let us briefly go through the timeline of the case because it is so important and illustrative of just how broken the system has become.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

I commend my right hon. Friend for the work he has done consistently over a long period on this issue. It is important to highlight the scale of the problem in London. Is it not true that there are more SLAPP cases being taken in the London courts than there are in Europe and America put together? Does that not illustrate the scale of the problem and the urgency with which we need to deal with it?

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I said earlier that London is now the preferred strike point for oligarchs in intimidating journalists. When the Foreign Policy Centre, whose work I must commend, surveyed investigative journalists, it found that three quarters of them had suffered some kind of legal attack to silence them. The UK legal system accounted for more of those legal actions than the United States and Europe put together. That is how bad this has now become. That is how rotten our system has now become. That is why it is so outrageous that the head of the Wagner Group was given the licences. Let us be clear about this guy. This is someone who has been running mercenary operations in Sudan, Mozambique, Syria, Central African Republic, Libya and Mali—and, of course, his forces have now been redeployed to the theatres in Ukraine.

It was in August 2020 that Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat began running a series of stories that exposed the barbarities of the Wagner Group in Africa, including offences such as the murder of CNN journalists. It took the British Government and the Foreign Office until 31 December 2020 to put sanctions on Prigozhin, even though, by the way, he had been sanctioned much earlier in the Unites States for the quiet sin of running troll farms intervening in the American presidential campaign. None the less, we got around to it at the back end of 2020. In the citation for sanctions, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office wrote that Prigozhin was providing

“a deniable military capability for the Russian state”.

That feels quite a big sin to me, running a deniable military capability for the Russian state. That sounds like a pretty good reason for sanctions. That sounds like a pretty good reason for not offering carve-outs to sanctions to undermine them in British courts.

When Mr Prigozhin found out about the sanctions he was not very happy, so he sought to undermine them by suing Bellingcat, or Eliot Higgins in an English court. He had a choice and in fact a debate: “Do we do it in a Russian court, a Dutch court or an English court?” The conclusion was to go for Eliot Higgins in an English court. To prosecute the case, he had to fly the lawyers out to St Petersburg, so the Treasury licensed £4,788.04 to help make that happen: over £3,500 for business class flights, £320 for accommodation at the Grand Hotel Europe Belmond, £150 for subsistence—that’ll buy a pretty good dinner—£200 for PCR testing and £400 for express visas. That is what servants of the Crown, under the supervision of Ministers of the Crown, signed off.

The discussions went a bit like this. “What are the objectives here, Mr Prigozhin? Well, we think that, rather than seeking damages, what we really need is to get Mr Higgins for defamation because that is how we undermine all those irritating articles” that led to the sanctions against Mr Prigozhin. Literally, we enabled the enablers. We enabled the cash flow of a Russian warlord to prosecute an English journalist in an English court. And that is why we have to act. No one in this House today thinks that this is okay. The Minister for Security does not think that it is okay. All of us here think it has to stop, but if it is to stop, we have to take aim at the original sin: the fact that it is courts in this country that are being used by oligarchs around the world to silence journalists.

Our new clause, which has drawn cross-party support today, is very simple. It would not stop all strategic legal actions against public participants, but it would stop anybody attempting to silence journalists who are trying to reveal economic crimes. It is within scope; I am grateful to the Clerks for their work helping to refine it and make it good. I know that the Minister will say, as he said in Committee, that this is not the right Bill for it, or that it would not solve all the problems, but that is an argument for making the perfect the enemy of the good.

We have heard the Lord Chancellor talking about his ambition to change the law, but we have also heard that he seeks to do so through the Bill of Rights. The dogs in the street know that the Bill of Rights Bill is dead. It is not coming back to this House any time soon, yet today—this week, next week, next month—journalists and indeed ex-Members of this House are in court, having to pay legal bills because we allow oligarchs to abuse our courts. Let us at least make progress now.

I say to the Minister: please do not be the Minister for mañana. Please be the Minister who did not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Please be the Minister who seeks to do what he can with what we have, where we are, today. We could use this Bill to make progress. Why do we not seize that opportunity with both hands?

I am very grateful for the concerted campaign by Members across this House. I will end by saluting the courage, fortitude and determination of so many good journalists in this country. Oliver Bullough, who wrote the brilliant books “Moneyland” and “Butler to the World”, makes an excellent argument in his openDemocracy article today. He says that journalists going into the business of tackling economic crime have an uphill struggle as it is, with a lot of barriers in their way. They have a pretty difficult job, and the knowledge that the British Government are on the side of the bad guys does not make that job any easier. It is time that we put the force of the state and the force of the Crown behind the good guys for once—and that means agreeing to our new clause today.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Liam Byrne and Clive Efford

Friday 22nd March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

The Secretary of State’s level of delusion is now bettering his previous level. He knows that the policy costings—which he has clearly not read—published by his right hon. Friend the Chancellor show that the housing benefit bill is not going down over the next couple of years, but going up. The Secretary of State’s efforts have been so successful that he is bringing in a policy—the hated bedroom tax—that will cost more than it saves. We saw the proof on Wednesday—housing benefit up by more than £1 billion. That is a mark of his failure.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State cannot rewrite history. This Government inherited the biggest council house building programme for 20 years. One of the first things they did was scrap it. They now have the lowest building starts since the 1920s—lower even than we had, and that is saying something.

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. What we needed in the Budget was determined action to build houses, not another subsidy for Britain’s richest citizens.

Let me start to conclude by reminding the House what most families will now experience. We heard in the Secretary of State’s speech some words about the rise in the personal allowance. The truth is that, even despite the rise in the personal allowance, the cuts buried in the Budget will mean that by April 2014-15 the same family who will see the personal allowance increase to £10,000 will be worse off. They will lose £600 a year in cuts, and my fear is that worse is to come.

The Chancellor gave away a lot of things in the first year of the next Parliament. Although we saw a little of how he will pay for it—he is going to fast-track the flat-rate pension—this is one of the great mysteries of this Budget, and we have not heard much about it yet. When the Minister winds up, I hope he will confirm at what rate the flat-rate pension will be introduced. The original White Paper set the figure at £144, which I notice is lower than £145, which is the combined total of pension credit and the state pension set out in the Budget book on Wednesday. As we know, the advance of the flat-rate pension offers the Treasury a huge national insurance windfall of about £5.5 billion in 2016-17 and 2017-18. What is interesting—we heard nothing about this—is that half of that windfall comes from public sector employers. The Library was able to tell me earlier in the week that the national health service, schools and the police will face a bill for £1.6 billion in higher national insurance contributions. We heard nothing about precisely where that money will come from. I hope the Minister will be able to set our minds at rest and say why this will not be another cut to the NHS in the next Parliament.

The second mystery surrounds the unspecified cuts of £11.5 billion in the first years of the next Parliament. We know that things such as the strivers tax and other cuts to working tax credits will deliver up to £6 billion, but where will the other £5 billion come from? Can DWP Ministers tell us how they will resist another huge great cut to welfare in the June spending review?

We got more of the same from the Chancellor on Wednesday and more of the same from the Secretary of State today. Once upon a time he liked to say that he cared about poverty. No more. One million children on his watch will be pushed into poverty. Tens of thousands of disabled people will follow. Families get less, while millionaires get more, all because this Chancellor has flatlined the economy and because the Secretary of State has asked for nothing, got nothing and delivered nothing to bring down unemployment.

Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill

Debate between Liam Byrne and Clive Efford

Tuesday 8th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

I shall give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford), but then I will make some progress.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

The argument coming from the Government Benches is wholly founded on misinformation, particularly in respect of the claim that the Government have created 1 million jobs in the private sector. Is my right hon. Friend aware that, according to the Office for National Statistics, 196,000 of those jobs are due solely to the reclassification of sixth-form colleges and further education colleges?

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is right: sometimes things are not all that they seem to be.

Finance Bill

Debate between Liam Byrne and Clive Efford

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Clive Efford]

My hon. Friend—

[Mr Byrne]

Was my hon. Friend alarmed, as I was, that the Finance Bill says nothing about preserving either zero rating or exempt categories for VAT, including for building services, for the rest of this Parliament?

[Clive Efford]

We have seen so many unexpected changes from the parties opposite, and my right hon. Friend is absolutely right to draw our attention to the fact that they have been silent on that issue.

I have another question about the Bill. Where does it mention the tax on the banks? When can we expect to see that measure before us? Why is it not part of the Bill? Perhaps the Liberal Democrats would like to intervene on me to tell me when we can expect to see it. We are told that it will be consulted on. If that is the case, is it going to go up or down, or is it going to stay as it is? What is the point of consulting the bankers—I assume that that is whom the Government are going to consult—on something that they would rather did not happen?

The Liberal Democrats told us that they were going to break up the casino banking system. The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills wanted the banks to be broken down into smaller banks, separating casino banking from normal banking. Yet we are told that the Chancellor opposes this and has set up a commission to look into it, which will take at least a year, thereby kicking it into the long grass. [Interruption.] I hear a sedentary intervention that we are dealing with the Finance Bill. Yes we are, and this is not in the Finance Bill, but it is an integral part of the Budget. It is therefore legitimate to ask where it is, when it is going to happen and what the consultation will be about, because it impacts on what taxes we raise on the people we represent. [Interruption.] I say to the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George), who did not make a very good job of defending his position on the increase, that that includes VAT.

On 12 March the Deputy Prime Minister called for a 10% tax on bank profits and a £2 billion job creation scheme to rescue the victims of recession. We keep being told by the Liberal Democrats that they have had an enormous impact on this Budget, so perhaps they could explain the impact they made here. I would have supported and voted for a 10% tax on bankers’ profits, instead of for taking people’s benefits away from them or for poor families paying VAT increases. After all, where did the financial problems start?

The Deputy Prime Minister kept digging during the general election, and on 20 April accused the bankers of behaving like “Arthur Scargill in pinstripes”. He then went on to say:

“The banks have basically been given untrammelled support by Labour and Conservative governments to do exactly what they like, and take massive risks with our livelihoods and our savings. They have been holding a gun to the economy. A progressive liberal like myself is not going to be squeamish about blowing the whistle on a vested interest.”

Well, where is it? Where is the whistleblowing on those vested interests?

The Liberal Democrat website—I do not know whether Liberal Democrat Members ever look at it—still says that they are going to bring “fundamental change” to our banking system.

“We will break them up and break them down.”

It continues:

“Until such a time, the taxpayer will have to continue underwriting the banks”—

well, we know that from this Budget.

“To recognise this, we are proposing a new levy on bank profits at a rate of 10%...This levy would be supplementary to corporation tax”.

Well, where did that happen? If we look at corporation tax outcomes—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Cheadle (Mark Hunter) intervenes from a sedentary position. Would he like to repeat what he just said? I think he said that the Lib Dems did not win. Well, we all know that; that is why we are complaining about what they are doing.

If I look at what the banks are saying about corporation tax, I find that they are rewarded and compensated for the £2 billion levy that the Budget wants to raise. We have some more juicy quotes here; the Lib Dems might want to listen to them. Here is one:

“Bankers were relieved that the chancellor’s speech failed to repeat the coalition government’s threat to end ‘unacceptable bonuses’”.

Deutsche Bank analysts noted the significance of the corporation tax change:

“Taking 2% off the 2012 tax rate for the five banks listed in the UK would increase profit by £1.16bn, that is it should almost offset all of the banks’ tax. Overall a good outcome for the banks.”

A number of bank analysts calculated that some banks could benefit from the Chancellor’s measures. As I have said, Deutsche Bank concluded that it was a “good outcome” for banks, while an analyst at UBS expected Lloyds and HSBC to benefit by 2012 because the cut in their corporation tax bill was larger than the hit that they sustained through the bank levy. HSBC banking analysts concurred:

“We’d expect most domestically-orientated banks, for example Lloyds, to be better off after four years than they were pre-budget”.

How has it come about that a party that went through the general election giving all those quotes about how they were going to break the banks up and break them down, and make the bankers pay until the pips squeaked, has come to support a Budget that takes from the bankers with one hand, pays it back with the other and rewards the banks with a tax benefit at the end of it? And at the same time they will be marching through the Lobbies to the drumbeats of the Tories, voting for cuts in benefits and an increase in VAT, and making the poorest people in our communities pay, when the banks are not paying.

It was all puff and wind from the Liberal Democrats during the election. We have heard it all before, and we are hearing it again. This time, however, they have actually got to vote for something. They are actually in charge and responsible for what they are voting for, and they are going to pay a very heavy price indeed.