Summit on Illicit Finance

Phil Brickell Excerpts

Tuesday 9th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Phil Brickell (Bolton West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Roger. I start by congratulating the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) on securing this vital debate, and on his comments about opaque property ownership. I said that this is a vital debate, but let us remind ourselves of the figures: £325 billion flows through the UK in illicit finance every year, which is more than 10% of this country’s GDP, and that figure rises to £780 billion annually when the Crown dependencies and overseas territories are included, according to the Finance Innovation Lab.

In the short amount of time available, let me say this: when the summit comes, it will be a measure of our convening power with global south countries as we look to build to chairing the G20 in 2027. It will be an opportunity to harness the private sector’s technical expertise as a leading financial services hub. It will be a chance for our law enforcement agencies to share their knowledge, whether the National Crime Agency, the Serious Fraud Office or the City of London police, who I had the pleasure of visiting in their Guildhall offices only last week. On crypto, it will be an opportunity to encourage like-minded partners to roll out sanctions packages similar to the one that the Foreign Office recently launched for the A7 in Kyrgyzstan. I must commend the Minister for his leadership on that.

Illicit finance touches more or less every facet of our lives and is a national security issue. Some £10 billion is laundered through the UK each year, by people traffickers, drug gangs and organised crime groups, and £6 billion of trade with Russia has been facilitated by UK overseas territories companies since 2022, including through sanctioned goods. It is also an economic issue, though. Let us remember that £325 billion is linked to corruption cases involving UK-connected services and that, each year, £33.4 billion is lost by the UK and almost $500 billion is lost globally to tax abuse.

Illicit finance also distorts our property market, as we have already heard. Some £11 billion of suspicious wealth has been identified in UK property, and £1.5 billion of that was linked to individuals accused of financial crime or with connections to the Kremlin. It is also a transparency issue: £190 billion-worth of property has no clearly identified beneficial owner. We heard of the Norfolk cottage, but we all have properties in our constituencies up and down the country that are affected by this issue. There are 236,500 properties across England and Wales that are held through opaque trusts, and there have been £6 billion-worth of suspicious property purchases made via overseas territories shell companies, of which more than 90% went through the British Virgin Islands. That speaks to the scale of the issue at hand.

Illicit finance damages our global reputation, too. Unless we tackle the issue both here in the UK and in the Crown dependencies and overseas territories, we will not address it in the full manner that it deserves to be addressed by all of us in this Chamber in order to do the right thing by my constituents. Let us recall the figures I mentioned at the start: each year, £788 billion flows through UK-linked systems, £10 billion is laundered and £33.4 billion is lost in UK tax revenue. The Minister knows those statistics and has heard me mention them time and again, but I am repeating them to drive home just how important this summit is, both to our country and around the globe, and to reiterate how crucial it is that we get the appropriate buy-in across Departments at the very top of Government.

Therefore, set against the backdrop of a new anti-money laundering and asset recovery strategy, a new economic crime plan being published later in the year and the Crown dependencies implementing greater transparency around their company registers in the coming month, I have two asks for the Minister. What can he say to reassure me that the rescheduled illicit finance summit will be the genuine cross-Government priority it deserves to be, and that this Government will drive global leadership on the all-encompassing issue of illicit finance? Secondly, somewhat at a tangent, after some concerning reporting by Bloomberg about the potential return of golden visas, can the Minister reassure me that his Department will work with the Department for Business and Trade and the Home Office to ensure that this Government never introduce a loophole that allows oligarchs and kleptocrats to buy their way into the UK?