Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, I acknowledge that I am no expert in the main areas of law central to this Bill—company law and banking law, for example. I am speaking to indicate my wholehearted support for all the measures designed to strengthen powers to combat corruption and rid this country of the dirty money and—as the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, just said—the dirty people who have been allowed for far too long to infest it. I will support amendments, however draconian they may seem, which will further pursue these ends.

There are two particular provisions not presently in the Bill that I would dearly like to see included. Both were canvassed in the House of Commons and have been touched on today. The first is the seizure of assets frozen under the Russian sanctions provisions, with a view to applying them to reparations for the ghastly destruction and demolition of so much of Ukraine. Secondly, there is the slapping down of SLAPPs. I will say a word or two on each.

As to the seizing of sanctioned assets, when this matter was originally before the House of Commons it was advanced on the limited basis that it would apply only if and to the extent that sanctioned individuals were to fail in their duty to disclose their UK assets. The amendment proposed that that failure be criminalised to allow seizure. Only yesterday, as has already been mentioned by, I think, the noble Lord, Lord Fox, a wider reaching Private Member’s Bill was presented to the House of Commons by Sir Chris Bryant. It had its First Reading with very impressive and widespread support. I am proud that it was drafted by my former judicial assistant in the Supreme Court, Tetyana Nesterchuk, a Ukrainian woman, who is now in the top commercial chambers, Fountain Court.

That Bill has great merit. It would allow the seizure of already frozen Russian state assets around the world. We are told they are worth some $350 billion, which is roughly the current estimated cost of reparations in Ukraine. The justification as a matter of law for the exception to the usual sovereign immunity protection for such state assets would be Russia’s endless and egregious violations of fundamental human rights, its failure to comply with orders of the International Court of Justice and so forth. I respectfully suggest that, instead of pursuing that as a Private Member’s Bill, as it was put before the House of Commons yesterday, it should be included within the compass of this Bill.

The second provision is SLAPPs. We have already heard a great deal about them. They have recently been thrown into great prominence, above all by a couple of cases: the efforts on behalf of Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner group of mercenaries, to muzzle Bellingcat and, more recently, the solicitor’s letters quite wrongly headed “without prejudice” written on behalf of Minister Zahawi to attempt to silence Dan Neidle. It could perhaps be argued that the second case would not within the scope of this Bill. However, in respect of trying to silence those investigating economic crime and the like, the Bill would provide a blueprint which would be capable of being applied on a wider basis across the board.

There is a great deal to be said—indeed, a great deal has already been said this evening—about SLAPPs. There was an excellent Thunderer column in the Times on Monday by Margaret Hodge, who has been driving this Bill in the Commons, and the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, who is shortly to speak. If you did not read Thunderer on Monday, you should; it will tell you about the abuse of SLAPPs.

I suggest a three-pronged approach to dealing with this problem. First, an amendment along the lines proposed in the House of Commons to provide a defence, to be heard, hopefully, at an early stage, where the defendant reasonably believes that the disclosure or publication that the claimant is seeking to prevent is in the interests of investigating economic crime.

Secondly, I suggest strengthening the processes—the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, expatiated on this—of the solicitors’ authorities, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and the Solicitors Regulation Authority, to try to deal with this, as they are already, but belatedly and thus far not very effectually. The SRA’s powers of fining were recently increased from £2,000 to £25,000 and, as noble Lords have heard, the committee that the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, chairs recommended a very considerable increase, I think from £25,000 to £25 million. At any rate, those processes should be strengthened.

Thirdly, the Bar, not merely solicitors, should perhaps be a little more astute and fastidious than it is at present in agreeing to act in these cases, before lending itself to the sort of intimidatory letters of which we have heard. My noble friend Lord Cromwell rightly commended the letter from the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, but I would respectfully add this to it: the lawyers acting for these claimants should bear very much in mind the intimidatory nature of the process and the likely acute imbalance between, on the one hand, the wealth of the claimants and the fact that they will be expensively represented, and, on the other hand, the fact that the defendants are likely to be impoverished—or certainly not particularly well heeled—without legal representation and, therefore, understandably anxious about all of this.

Finally, I suggest that the taxi-rank rule, which so many would try to invoke in their favour on these occasions, applies full-force, as it should, in criminal cases where the liberty of the subject is at stake. But it applies a lot less obviously in these sorts of cases, and of course it does not apply to solicitors at all anyway.

My Lords, enough. I hope that the Bill may perhaps be amended to include both of those matters, and, in the meantime, I wish it well.