Sanctions

Tom Tugendhat Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[James Cleverly]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point. Let me make it absolutely clear: our aim is to prevent further aggression, for Russian troops to withdraw from where they have advanced, and for them to move away from the Ukrainian border and remove that threat from the Ukrainian people. It is a series of events that I will explain further if the House gives me the opportunity.

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend will know from his career in the Army that the principle of “clout, don’t dribble” is an important one to ensure that the opposition understands that we are serious. Does he agree that the ratchet could be misinterpreted as giving a free pass at an early stage, rather than drawing a clear line that needs not to be crossed?

[James Cleverly]

My hon. and gallant Friend makes a point I fully understand, and I can assure him the Government fully understand it too. The pace at which we ratchet up our sanctions response in conjunction with our international partners is very much to not just send a message, although sending a message is important, but to ensure the sanctions are meaningfully felt by the Russian leadership and those people around Vladimir Putin funding him and propping him up.

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[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

I welcome the Government’s plans for sanctions and increased action to try to clean up the mess in which we find ourselves here in the UK. This is certainly a welcome step in the right direction, and my right hon. Friend the Minister will remember that the Foreign Affairs Committee set out various options for how we should begin to think about this in May 2018, when we published our “Moscow’s Gold” report.

I welcome the direction we are taking but, along with many others on both sides of the House, I am afraid that I find myself asking, “Why not more? Why not further?” In many ways, we are using the actions of a hostile state in eastern Ukraine to justify something we should have done years ago. The UK, sadly, has for too long been an avenue for money laundering by despots and criminals around the world. For too long and on too many occasions, we have seen our institutions, our City and our service sector used to hide the gains from corrupt practices and criminality abroad.

This has now come to a head because those criminals, those thieves, who raped and murdered the Russian people for 20 years, who did not replace the oligarchs that rose up in Yeltsin’s day but merely nationalised them, have been using those same vehicles and avenues to hide the profits of their crimes—most tragically the theft of an entire country.

That act of naked brutality, that act of violence against an entire nation, an entire culture and an entire people, has sadly been allowed to profit a small number of individuals. That is an absolute tragedy. It is a tragedy for the people of Russia, who have lost so much, but it is also a tragedy for her neighbours, who are now under such pressure and such threat. It is not just Ukraine but the people of Belarus, the people of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and the people of Poland. It is a tragedy for those who are being weaponised in the human trafficking that we are seeing from the middle east, through Belarus and into the forests of eastern Europe. It is also, sadly, a tragedy for the people of these wonderful islands, the people of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—the people of the United Kingdom.

It is a tragedy for us because this marks what my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) mentioned only a few hours ago in this Chamber. We are seeing not just the aggression against Donetsk and Luhansk—not just a raid, an invasion, an opening salvo of a war that President Putin is trying to bring to Europe, in many ways for the first time in 80 years, although of course there was an exception in 2014 when he invaded Crimea and another in 2008 when he invaded Georgia; what he is doing to us, to the people of these islands, is unpicking the values and principles that our grandparents fought for 80 years ago.

President Putin is unpicking the principle that we embedded into the constitutions of the United Nations and the Council of Europe. He is unpicking the principle that the rule of law, that the debate among sovereign peoples, should be the way disputes are settled in this world. He is replacing the rule of law with the rule of force. Sadly, he is demonstrating that it works not only on the ground, but in the wallet; he is demonstrating that a leader can profit politically and personally from the abuses he conducts against his own people and his neighbours. That is why when I asked my right hon. and gallant Friend the Minister, who served with distinction in the Royal Artillery, about the classic gunner phrase “clout, don’t dribble”, what I was actually asking about—and he recognises it—is why do we not say immediately and clearly that what we are seeing today is wrong.

It is wrong for the people of the UK to have corrupt money flowing through our systems. It is wrong to have the profit of crime being laundered through our City and through jurisdictions overseas that depend on us. It is wrong to see the wages of war—quite literally—profiting a small cabal of thieves in Moscow. It is wrong because it undermines our security, it makes us more vulnerable and, sadly, it exposes the people we are privileged to represent to the dangers that we have, thank God, kept at bay for 80 years. It is wrong because it threatens the people of the United Kingdom.

We have set out ways to address that. We have spoken at various points about a foreign agents registration Act and about the exposure of beneficial ownership, not just in our own estates, but in the jurisdictions around the world. We have spoken about cleaning up the Companies House register and giving powers to the enforcement agencies, which could actually start to take action on this. We have spoken about all those things for many, many years, yet still we see names such as Mickey Mouse and Adolf Hitler in the list of directors in Companies House. Still we see the toleration, sadly, of fraud in too many of our institutions. Sadly, we still do not see the resources going into the policing of these different institutions.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

My hon. Friend is making a superb speech. One thing that often gets missed in this debate about how we crack economic crime is the role of whistleblowers. They are the most likely people to identify wrongdoing in the banks he mentions and bring it to light and to the enforcement agencies. Does he agree that whistleblower protection, and potentially remuneration, should be included in this context?

[Tom Tugendhat]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend on that. He is completely right, as usual, in highlighting that the protection of whistleblowers is an essential part of the exposure to justice of those who have committed crimes. We need to think again about crime. We need to look again at the institutions, law enforcement bodies and agencies that are charged with protecting us and think really hard about their budgets. They are not simply ways of stopping the taxman from getting his hands on a little bit more loot; they are fundamental to our national security and to the protection of our people. We need to think of them as agents of the state in the same way as we think of the armed forces or the intelligence services. We need to think of them on the frontline of the protection of the people we are lucky to represent. Frankly, we need to put the money where so often our mouths have been when we have passed Acts in this House that have not had the resources to make them not just law but actionable law.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I am going to bang on about the draft Registration of Overseas Entities Bill. I served on the prelegislative scrutiny Committee on the Bill with several colleagues from different parties. We agreed a set of amendments and the Government accepted them, but they failed to bring through the Bill and the powers for Companies House and the Land Registry. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is about not just money but the fact that the Government have been sitting on their hands in respect of powers for the relevant organisations?

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[Tom Tugendhat]

The hon. Member is right that more legislation would help, but fundamentally we need the resources for the agencies.

Let me close by saying that I welcome the direction the Government have taken. I welcome the commitment to do more to defend the people of Ukraine, which the Foreign Affairs Committee was privileged to visit only a few weeks ago. I welcome the fact that we are standing in defence of democracy, freedom and the rule of law. But I urge my right hon. and gallant Friend the Minister to look again at the sanctions, many of which were introduced four or eight years ago by the United States Government—I was just reading the United States Treasury document that listed the subjects of sanctions in, I think, 2014—because we can go further. There is so much more that we can do.

It is of course right that we act in concert with our partners and in tandem with our allies, and that we make sure we do not expose division by acting alone, but one of the great strengths of this Government, this House and this nation is that we have running through the sinews of our economy so much of the world’s finance that it puts a particular responsibility on us to stand up and defend the economic liberties that keep our people safe, enable our prosperity and build the rule of law around the world.

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[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I associate myself with everything that the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) has just said; I completely agree with him. Democracy is a very tender flower. We thought it was very robust and it would survive all weathers, but the truth is that it needs watering, care and tenderness. All too often, it is very easy for authoritarian regimes to trample on it and kill it.

I associate myself, too, with the comments of the hon. Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith). We have no beef with the people of Russia. The people of Russia are fine people with not only a strong culture and history, but many strong democratic traditions and understandings of what it is to be a human being and to work in solidarity with others. Our beef is with the regime; it is with Putin.

I agree that we have been recklessly naive for far too long in relation to our relationship with Vladimir Putin. It pains me—I understand why Tony Blair was doing it—that we gave him a state visit so early in his time. We wanted to press the reset button, as did Obama, and it gained us absolutely nothing; it just showed us to be weak. We have been pitiful. We have been puny. We have vacillated. We have been spineless. Quite often we have looked craven because we just want Russian money to prop up our banks, pay our lawyers and keep our consultancy firms going.

Maybe we could forgive the fact that Putin is a thieving kleptocrat—after all, most off the theft is done against his own people. It leaves his own people poorer than they were when he came to power, though. It is maybe just a matter for the Russian people that he has enriched himself beyond the wildest dreams of Imelda Marcos and Muammar al-Gaddafi put together. But three things make him truly dangerous: his territorial ambitions, his excessive use of force, and his lies and misinformation.

Just look at Beslan, where 334 hostages were killed in the end by Russian state actors, including 176 children. Just look at the Moscow theatre siege, where 130 hostages were killed by Russian state actors. Look at Chechnya—I could go on for ages—and look at Georgia. They compare the situation in Donetsk and Luhansk with the situation in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Of course, it is exactly the same playbook: “Set up a pretext and then move in.” Look at the downing of Flight MH17. Look at the murders of Boris Nemtsov, Sasha Litvinenko, Dawn Burgess, Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Magnitsky and so many others.

Yes, I am angered by the naivete that I sometimes see in this country. I have seen it often in this Chamber, and I have seen it also from the left. Stop the War said:

“We oppose the deployment of British forces to the borders of Russia as a pointless provocation.”

What utterly stupid naivete. Where on earth is the condemnation of the 190,000 Russian troops on the border, the annexation of Crimea, or the snipers shooting at Ukrainian forces now? This is not just naivete; it is monumental and dangerous stupidity, and we should call it out.

I confess that I was absolutely sickened by Putin’s speech last night. The Minister cannot say it, but I can: the man is deranged, unhinged and a danger to his own people, as well as to the people of Ukraine. I said in this House in March 2014:

“A Russian friend of mine says that Putin is not yet mad. That may be true, but what will our surrendering and our appeasement do for his sanity?”—[Official Report, 18 March 2014; Vol. 577, c. 679.]

We can now see what his madness has done. I am reluctant to use the word “appeasement” too often, but sometimes what has been done has felt like appeasement.

Putin’s argument about Russians and Ukrainians being one people—again, I understand that the Minister cannot say this, but I can—is the same as Hitler’s about the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938. Hitler said then that he only wanted to protect the Sudeten Germans. It was a lie. Some people said so in this Chamber in 1938. Some of them laid down their life in the ensuing slaughter, and they have their shields up here. However, Chamberlain bought the lie, and the following spring Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia without so much as a by-your-leave. Be in no doubt: this is not a Russian peacekeeping mission; it is an annexation, an invasion and a declaration of war. Putin knows that it will lead to significant bloodshed on a massive scale because the Ukrainians are more determined to fight now than they ever have been. If anything, Putin’s behaviour over these years has reinforced the Ukrainians’ sense of solidarity.

Putin is not just interested in the parts of Luhansk and Donetsk already in separatists’ hands; of course he is not. He wants Avdiivka, which is metres across the demarcation line, where the Foreign Affairs Committee saw Russian snipers pointing at Ukrainian troops just three weeks ago. He wants Kramatorsk, where we met community leaders, including the local priest. He wants Mariupol, and of course he wants Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Odessa—the whole of Ukraine. He wants to reshape the contours of Europe by force because he thinks that that is to be his legacy.

Of course, I support the statutory instrument and I am glad we are doing this, but today’s sanctions—the ones that have been announced today, which rely on this instrument—are wholly inadequate. I think that is the message from the whole House, and I hope the Government are hearing it loud and clear. They do not match the rhetoric of what the Government are saying, and when actions do not match rhetoric, we undermine that rhetoric and put ourselves in a worse position, not in a better one.

The banks are the small change of the Russian economy, they really are: they are shrapnel down the back of the sofa. The individuals have already been sanctioned for four years by the Americans. This really is netting in the minnows while letting the basking sharks swim freely. As somebody else said, it is taking a peashooter to a gunfight. Putin, frankly, will beat this feather duster away. He will just laugh at us. In effect, Medvedev was laughing at us yesterday, even before we announced anything, because he said that the Russians will be able to wear whatever we throw at them. It is a beautiful irony, is it not, that one of the people who will be sanctioned, when the Government are able to bring their measure in relation to Members of the Duma, is Andrey Lugavoy, who was one of the murderers of Alexander Litvinenko? Incidentally, can I just say that, if anybody has not met Marina Litvinenko, she is one of the most wonderful people who have ever walked the face of this earth?

I think a sanctions regime in this context has to go hand in hand with, first, a proper public register of beneficial ownership of property. I do not understand from the Prime Minister whether it is his intention now to introduce that, because it keeps on being conflated with various other forms. I hope that is the plan, but it has been promised for a long time, so some of us are beginning to get a little bit cynical.

Secondly, there has to be complete reform of Companies House, so that it actually has some powers to interrogate the information given to it. As the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee has said, at the moment anybody could say that they are Tom Tugendhat, or Mickey Mouse—or Vladimir Putin, no doubt—with impunity.

Thirdly, there has to be real openness about the review of the tier 1 visa scheme. The Home Secretary has cited “security concerns” about

“corrupt elites who threaten our national security and push dirty money around our cities.”

That is about people who already have tier 1 visas. As I understand it, this review is complete—it was completed some time ago—and it must be published soon. We need to understand what these tier 1 visas did, and where the vulnerabilities are in the British economy. I really hope that the Home Secretary will come to the House to do that very soon.

We need a foreign agents Act, as has been mentioned, and of course we need to reform the Official Secrets Act. We have no means of tackling spies in this country. It is almost impossible to send somebody to prison for spying in this country for the Russian Government.

[Tom Tugendhat]

Do we not need an update of the Treason Act? A treason charge can be laid only in relation to the person of the monarch, and this Act from 1351 really does need updating.

[Chris Bryant]

I agree, and on all these promises of legislation, which I think it is being suggested will come in the next Session of Parliament, frankly, we need to get a bit of a bloody—sorry, we need to get a bit of a move on, because all of this should have been in place years ago. Our report came out in 2018, the Intelligence and Security Committee report came out in 2019, and we still have not done any of this. I say to the Minister that we all stand ready to help in that process. We do feel a bit as though we are dragging him to be chased, so do not run away from us, but be chased and help us to bring in the legislation that will put us in a better place.

My final point is that I do not understand the Government’s ratchet decision at the moment. It is a complete mystery to me. There has already been an invasion and incursion, and we said prior to the incursion that we would hit Russia hard with sanctions. That is not what is on offer today. When the Prime Minister resigned as Foreign Secretary, he said that his greatest failure—his biggest mistake as Foreign Secretary—was his relationship with Russia. I think he has a long way to go to rescue what has happened today. We want tougher action and we beg the Government to introduce it.