Piracy

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, the incidence of piracy in the Indian Ocean has rather slid off the front pages of the newspapers in recent months. That is partly due to the relative success of the measures taken by the international community to combat this modern form of an ancient scourge. However, it would be ridiculously complacent to believe that the problem has gone away or been mastered. There is all the more reason, therefore, to be grateful to my noble friend Lord Luce for initiating this debate and for swinging the spotlight back onto the many aspects of this problem which have yet to be effectively addressed.

I want to concentrate my own remarks on one aspect of the problem to which the EU home affairs sub-committee, which I chair, has devoted a good deal of attention, without as yet receiving any fully satisfactory response from the Government. That is the question of the laundering of the money paid out to the pirates in ransom. Some facts are not disputed. The pirates or their sponsors—their godfathers—have received and are still receiving massive quantities of cash in ransom for ships and their crews. Much of that money is assembled in this country, which is not in any way illegal. These moneys are therefore quite evidently criminal assets—the proceeds of crime—as soon as they are handed over. Yet those assembling these ransoms are not required to file with the Serious Organised Crime Agency a suspicious activity report, as they would have to do in any other circumstances in which money was being transferred to criminals or people suspected of being criminals.

My committee has stated on several occasions that it considers this omission—the omission of the requirement to file an SAR—as quite indefensible. Moreover, it surely does hamper any attempt to prevent these moneys subsequently being laundered. More recently, in a move that I warmly welcomed, and as part of the international community’s fight against piracy, it was decided to established a regional intelligence centre in the Seychelles to pursue, among other matters, the issue of money laundering. I asked in an earlier debate whether any relevant SAR material we might have would be made available to this new intelligence centre as it surely should be. The noble Lord, Lord Henley, who was at the time a Minister at the Home Office, said he would reply to that in writing, but I have still—some months later—not received any substantive reply on this point.

Therefore, I should be most grateful if the Minister would now respond to both these questions. What justification can there possibly be for not requiring the assemblers of ransoms to file an SAR? Are we making available relevant SAR material we may have to the intelligence centre in the Seychelles? Any serious campaign against piracy in the Indian Ocean must surely get to grips with the issue of money laundering.

I have one final point which was also made by speakers who preceded me. The challenge of piracy in the Indian Ocean cannot, of course, be met by naval action alone or even by naval action backed up by good intelligence. It must also involve the gradual re-establishment of stability and the rule of law in Somalia and the other countries of the region. I hope that the international community, of which we are a leading part in this region of the world, will not allow that task to fail through lack of resources and lack of political will, as it so lamentably did before in the 1990s.