Criminal Finances Bill

Debate between Nigel Mills and Mark Field

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 21st February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I rise to address the new clauses that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) spoke about and new clause 6. I will begin by speaking to the new clauses tabled by my right hon. and learned Friend and the measures tabled by the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell), who co-chairs the all-party group on anti-corruption, on the failure to prevent economic crime.

The hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Roger Mullin) knows far more about such things than I do, and he made his argument well, but I reinforce the point that there is a strong feeling among the public, because if large companies are seen to be part of some very serious criminal activity, people are confused about why those companies and the senior people within them have not been prosecuted for those serious offences. If people look across the Atlantic, they see that America does manage to prosecute senior bankers for such offences, so they think, “We see all our banks being fined in America for being guilty of rigging various markets, yet why are no senior directors of those companies being prosecuted here? Why are those banks not being prosecuted?” That exposes the fact that our law, as the hon. Gentleman explained, has become out of date. It seems horribly unfair that the Serious Fraud Office finds it comparatively easy to prosecute very small companies and their directors, when it is clear who the controlling minds are, but that when we see far more serious offences being committed by, on behalf of, or for the benefit of much larger companies, we cannot quite find enough evidence to prosecute those companies or their very senior directors.

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

In the US context, does my hon. Friend accept that there is often a political element there, despite the division of power? The prosecutor is often looking to make a name for himself by taking on a big bank—often, it has to be said, a big non-US bank. It is a particular concern—not just in the banking world but beyond—that overseas companies tend to be fair game as far as prosecutions are concerned. There is actually a rather different regime there, and it might not necessarily point to a desire and a need for a change in UK law.

[Nigel Mills]

I agree with my right hon. Friend’s point. It is interesting that the United States seems to favour prosecuting large banks and large companies that are internationally owned rather than US-owned. I am sure that the Foreign Office is trying to work out whether that is an unfair, anti-competitive move by the US. He is right that we should not try to read too much across from the US system into ours, but I was trying to make the point that people are confused about why people are prosecuted in the US but not over here.

That takes me back to the point that it seems unfair that while we can prosecute directors of small businesses, we cannot prosecute when we see much more serious offences in large businesses. That is why I support extending the model of the failure to prevent that we already have in place for bribery and that we are adding for tax evasion. We are talking about other very serious economic crimes, and it is hard to make a distinction as to why we would rank some of these offences as less important or serious such that we do not take the power to prosecute so that we prevent serious fraud, for instance.

I welcome the Government’s consultation on those issues, and it is right that it would be somewhat premature to legislate before we get the outcome of the consultation, as that might make a mockery of the idea of consulting. It is a real pity that although this Bill is the ideal vehicle in which to act, we cannot, because of the timing, make the change that we want. We will be relying on another relevant Bill being introduced later in this Parliament so that we can finally make the change. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough said, it would be helpful if the Minister would make some encouraging noises about how seriously the Government take such matters and when we might expect to see some progress following the consultation, if the Government were minded to proceed with legislation.

I will take a bit of a leap from that topic to the subject of new clause 6—our grouping is interesting. For quite a long while, I thought that I was supporting Government policy by encouraging our overseas territories and Crown dependencies to adopt the same transparency regarding beneficial ownership that we are putting in place for the UK through the Bill. The previous Prime Minister was absolutely right to make efforts to get those territories and dependencies to agree to having transparent registers. I think that we all welcome the fact that the territories have moved a fair way in agreeing to have registers and reliable information on the beneficial owners of companies operating there. We all congratulate them on that, and look forward to that being in place; we all recognise that it will be a great step forward for various law enforcement authorities to be able to get that information relatively speedily to help prosecutions here. However, that does not go far enough, and we recognise that by saying in new clause 6 that we want a transparent register.

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[Mark Field]

My hon. Friend makes a strong and powerful case, but does he not recognise the distinction between privacy and secrecy? No one wants an entirely secret element, but most people who indulge in banking, whether in an overseas territory or anywhere else, expect a certain amount of privacy. There is no question but that we would expect law enforcement, the police and the tax authorities to have access to these registers. My hon. Friend has been fair in making the point that ultimately a lot of these issues should be constitutional questions for the territories; these measures should not be imposed on them by the UK. On the notion that anyone should have access to that information beyond the authorities I mentioned, as they would in his Tajikistan example, surely he can understand the reluctance for that to happen, particularly in the globalised financial world in which we live, and particularly if the same does not apply elsewhere.

[Nigel Mills]

I accept that we hear the privacy argument a lot—I am sure that it is made in the UK context as well—but we have taken the decision to have transparent registers so that we know who the ultimate beneficial owners of these entities are. If I think through the scenarios in which people would have a right to privacy, I can perhaps see that there might be a good reason not to publish if there is a real issue of individual safety, but I struggle to find many other situations for which there is a good argument for people being able to establish entities or other bodies in the overseas territories without being clear about who the ultimate owner is. If someone owns a company here or is a shareholder, that has to be public. That transparency exists for any kind of entity here, so I am not sure why a different argument ought to apply for our dependencies. In weighing the right to privacy against the right to ensure that we are not letting dirty, corrupt, criminal money into the system, we have to err on the latter side of the equation.