Autocrats, Kleptocrats and Populists

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

My noble friend Lord Browne of Ladyton has chosen an excellent Motion to table because democracy around the world is under threat and needs urgent action to protect it.

Never forget that modern kleptocracies rely on some of us here in the West to help them launder money. Lobbyists, lawyers and accountants in democracies keep kleptocrats in power, often by hiding their money in offshore tax havens, and get rich as a result. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports that the prevalence of these tax havens, many of them our dependent territories, and a general trend towards financial deregulation have made it increasingly difficult to identify and sanction criminal assets.

That brings me to a report from Chatham House—not a party-political organisation, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Balfe—which said that Boris Johnson’s Conservative parliamentary party

“may be open to influence from wealthy donors who originate from post-Soviet kleptocracies, and who may retain fealty to these regimes.”

The Conservative Party received £3.5 million from naturalised British citizens of Russian and Eurasian backgrounds between 2010 and 2019, and the volume of donations has increased.

Kleptocrats are cementing their power in the United Kingdom by cleverly forging ties with political and business leaders, creating charitable foundations, seeking the support of think tanks and elite universities, and buying prestigious commodities such as football clubs, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, rightly said. Access to these points of entry must be tightened. Sadly, Putin will not take our threats seriously if we allow this to continue. There is a growing need for action nationally and internationally.

For example, the US sanctioned Latvia’s ABLV Bank in 2018, which eventually led to the collapse of the firm, cutting off at least one source of funding for the North Korean Government. Europe also needs to follow the money. Restricting the flows of illicit finance that run through our markets and institutions, public and private, is key to tackling the threats posed by Russian electoral interference, Chinese competition and democratic backsliding in central Europe. We cannot tackle these challenges alone. The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance against Kleptocracy is an excellent example of how democracies are joining forces to make real progress against a rising tide of corruption, but much more needs to be done.

I want to highlight the case of Belarus. According to the Global State of Democracy 2021 report, Belarus is undergoing a year-on-year democratic decline, which is relatively rare. The only other countries where a similar trend was observed were Palestine, Côte d’Ivoire and the Central African Republic. According to Freedom House’s annual report, in Belarus:

“Political rights and civil liberties have become even more restricted than before, and democracy remains a distant aspiration.”


Russia, as we know, is using Belarus as a base to amass troops to threaten Ukraine. We have seen the effect of that; they are now within easy reach of getting to Kiev. Russia’s primary objective in Belarus is to avoid a colour revolution resulting in the installation of a new, pro-western, democratic Government seeking closer ties with us in Europe and NATO. All this is underpinned by Lukashenko’s autocratic regime. Libereco, an independent German-Swiss NGO dedicated to the protection of human rights in Belarus, reports that there are currently more than 900 political prisoners there, including women and men, young and old, from all strata of Belarus society. They only exercised their basic rights to freedom of expression and assembly and campaigned for a free and democratic Belarus.

According to Amnesty International, adopting political prisoners can have a hugely beneficial impact on their mental health and help to protect them from further abuse by the state. I am one of a number of UK Peers, including my noble friend Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, and MPs who have adopted a political prisoner: in my case, Stefan Latypov, who I keep in touch with to offer support and hope. I hope others here today will follow that example.