Aid: Anti-Corruption Measures

Lord Anderson of Swansea Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd April 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord on his initiative and on his challenges, particularly on long-termism.

My concern is that, with so much evidence of serious corruption and malpractice, those in the field and on the front line will become demotivated, and the public—the taxpayers—will become demoralised and turn against development aid. There are many such stories. Last week, for example, I read of the position in Haiti. Ten years after the earthquake, little has changed and, after 18 years, PetroCaribe has become a vast cash machine: $2.4 billion has just disappeared, at a time when there is so much need in that sad country.

Yet we in Europe should be hesitant about throwing stones at those in the developing world. For example, the Nordics top the league tables of the least corrupt countries in the world, but there is increasing evidence of their defences against corruption crumbling before the incoming tide of Russian dirty money. If a branch makes a healthy profit, why should the head office worry about it? Take Danske Bank; over €200 billion of questionable Russian money flowed through its Estonian branch. Last week, the biggest bank in the Baltics, Swedbank, was revealed to be the conduit for €135 billion of Russian and other ex-Soviet money.

How well do we do at combating this? How clean are our hands? At the risk of complacency, overall our record is good. We are just eighth in the Transparency International index. The anti-corruption strategy from 2017 to 2022 is impressive, showing a clear awareness of the problem domestically and internationally, and a determination to establish monitoring procedures. The noble Lord mentioned the problem of Iraq; I hope that when we turn to reconstruction in Syria, we will have learned some of the lessons from there. It is absurd that Russia is looking to the West to take a major role in reconstruction in Syria, having wreaked so much damage itself.

Most troubling of all is the claim trumpeted in the strategy document:

“We will put transparency at the heart of our approach to government. This will include continuing to champion the adoption of public registers of company beneficial ownership and working with the UK’s Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies to implement strengthened arrangements. It is our ambition to ensure all countries adopt public registers”.


Since then, an amendment has been moved in Parliament. We note, for example, that only after the Skripal outrage in Salisbury did the Government yield to all-party pressure and bring the overseas territories, such as the British Virgin Islands and others, into the net of a public register—to yelps of pain from the overseas territories. Equally, when faced with a similar all-party coalition in the other place to make the Crown dependencies have public registers, the Government unexpectedly withdrew a whole Bill, to which the all-party coalition had tacked the question of the Crown dependencies. If we believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that we should set a great example ourselves, coming to the table with clean hands when we lecture the developing world, we should clearly look carefully at what we have done on transparency, with regard to the overseas territories and the Crown dependencies—Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man—or we shall rightly be accused of hypocrisy. Dickens defined hypocrisy as a signpost that points the way to go but does not go there itself. We should be well aware of that danger. Our record is good, but there are omissions and problems of which we should be well aware.