Liam Byrne
MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North · Labour · United Kingdom
“The loss of 4,000 jobs at Jaguar Land Rover is a body blow for workers, families and communities across the west midlands, so I commend Richard Parker, the Mayor of the West Midlands, for moving quickly on Monday to put £500,000 on the table to help ensure that everybody gets back to work.”
“I wholeheartedly welcome this well-rounded statement from the Foreign Secretary, and put on record my thanks to the new Prime Minister for the hard yards that I know he has put in over recent days and weeks.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I offer my warmest congratulations to her on her appointment to the role; she will be a brilliant Minister.”
“Let me start with a word of thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), who is not in her place, who said quite rightly that an awful lot has changed since the Bill was first introduced to this House. Indeed, a lot has been revealed over the course of the summer.”
“The effect of new clause 34 would be to ban off-ramping, ban new forms of digital currency transactions and ban memecoins, which are exactly the kind of measures that Ministers now need to bring forward. If we want to take the crypto system out of political finance, this is what we need to do.”
“No doubt we will learn that Mr Cottrell was in fact on the electoral register when that money was passed. No doubt we will discover that his mother, Fiona Cottrell, declared and did not disguise the fact that the money had ultimately come from her son.”
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“I will come to that now. There are three things that we will need to do. It is not just about private wealth; it is about public wealth—the assets of the Russian central bank. We know that $300 billion was held abroad. We know where about $30 billion of it is, and that money has been frozen. To seize that money, we will need to do a couple of things. First, we will need to bring the world together at the United Nations to pass a resolution that revokes the doctrine of immunity for central banks when there has been a clear violation of the United Nations charter. I am under no illusions; we will not get 100%, but by getting a significant number of nations to sign up to that resolution, we begin to change the parameters of international law. That means that domestic law, when we move it, will be in a much safer legal space.”
“We in this House have to be realistic about the scale of finance that is needed; maximise the use of our Bretton Woods institutions; and move internationally and domestically, together with our allies, to change the parameters of international law and maximise the safety and security of domestic legislation that we pass here. But let us move now to send a clear signal from the UK—the home of the rule of law—that this is not going to be a safe haven for sanctions evasion. We are going to send that clear message by getting tough, and getting tough now.”
“Despite this flagrant abuse—and we know the scale of it, because the Financial Times told us that $250 million has been laundered by the Wagner Group—we have just two fines that total £86,000. Well, £86,000 in fines is not going to do much to help us rebuild Ukraine. I ask the Minister on the Front Bench to explain to us how she is going to do an awful lot better than that. Sanctions enforcement in this country stinks to high heaven, and what concerns me most is the culture of secrecy around it. Many of us in this House have been around long enough to know that such a culture is never a recipe for good public policy.”
“I then asked whether they could at least tell us how many people we have busted for sanctions evasion. The Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation confessed that there were 147 reports of a breach last year, but when I asked the Minister for Security how many criminal investigations had resulted from that, he said that he could not answer “For reasons of operational security”. I went back to the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation report to double-check, and of 147 reports of a breach, there have been a grand total of two monetary fines, both to fintech companies. So there we have it: £18 billion frozen and licences issued like confetti in a secret regime that Ministers say is down to civil servants and civil servants say is actually advice to Ministers.”
“1014.] I then asked what this delegated framework was and whether we in this House might have a look at it. I first tried a parliamentary question. The answer came back on 8 February: “There are currently no plans to publish the delegation framework.” I then had to try a freedom of information request, and I have it here in my hand. It came back to me on 9 March, and it says: “we can confirm that HM Treasury does hold information within the scope of your request. The information we have identified…we believe may engage the exemption provided for by section 35(1)(a)—formulation or development of Government policy.” We now have a situation where Ministers are saying that it is the civil servants’ job, and the civil servants are saying that it is advice to Ministers. For that reason, we cannot get to what this delegated framework looks like.”
“In fact, 33 general licences were issued last year, so I naturally asked what the value of those general licences totalled. I was told on 15 February in a parliamentary answer: “The Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) does not disclose data from specific licences it has granted under UK sanctions regimes.” When the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury came to the House on 25 January, we asked him whether, if he cannot tell us what the total value of the licences is, he could at least tell us what the licences were issued for. He said he could not tell us that because “there is a delegated framework” and that these decisions “are routinely taken by senior civil servants.” —[ Official Report , 25 January 2023; Vol. 726, c.”
“We then learned from the scandal exposed by openDemocracy that the Treasury has been issuing licences like confetti, even to warlords such as Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group—in his case, to fly English lawyers to St Petersburg to prosecute an English journalist in an English court in order to silence him because he was writing the stories that triggered the sanctions against Prigozhin in the first place. What a nonsense! As I began to dig into this, much worse was revealed. In the last Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation report, it was revealed that the Treasury is no longer issuing licences to individuals one by one to authorise specific expenditure; it is now issuing general licences that authorise an entire category of spending.”
“If we are to maximise the assets that we seize and repurpose for the reconstruction of Ukraine, we have to get serious about sanctions enforcement. Right now, frankly, we are not. There will be a lot more money available if we stop the nonsense that is going on in the dark at the moment. The truth is that sanctions enforcement in this country today is the proverbial riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. As the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green said, we have been told that as of October 2022, £18.4 billion-worth of Russian assets have been frozen in this country.”
“I think that we can use the same tactics to seize private and public assets, but I am conscious that we have to change the context and parameters of international law first. That is how we maximise the safety of domestic legislation, which has to be the third step. We in this House are lucky that my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda has set out precisely how to do that in his ten-minute rule Bill. Crucially, we need to ensure that the State Immunity Act 1978, which gives immunity to central banks, is revoked or at least conditioned in a way that allow laws to be presented here so that we in Parliament can order the seizure, forfeiture and repurposing of assets. My final point is a little more short term, meaning now.”
“As ever, my hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech. I was shocked to hear that suspicious activity reports are not triggering enforcement actions for sanctions busting either. Is that not an argument for broadening the suspicious activity report regime, so that it does include people like estate agents? Surely, we should be using that as evidence to trigger prosecutions.”
“The Financial Times has revealed that the Wagner Group has channelled $250 million into its organisation through sanctions evasion. Is that not evidence that the sanctions implemented against the Wagner Group are not working? What information can the Minister supply to persuade the House that the enforcement regime is actually effective?”
“I welcome what I heard was the recognition that when it comes to China we need to do far more to defend our values, while recognising that there are global public goods that we need to work on together, such as climate change, nuclear proliferation in the Pacific and global development. Since the last integrated review, the so-called “tilt” to the Indo-Pacific has entailed £3 million extra in FCDO staff, three extra British high commissioners in the Pacific, two extra warships and less than 1% of the MOD headcount. That it not a tilt but a glance in the right direction. Could the Foreign Secretary tell us how big the package will be to finance the tilt needed to an area of £4.3 billion people?”
“The Foreign Secretary has made an outstanding start to the debate. Last week, the Vice-President of the United States said that the US has formally determined that Russia has committed crimes against humanity. Has His Majesty’s Government now come formally to the same conclusion?”
“My right hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech. Was he as surprised as I was that there was so little mention of that kind of threat in the Integrated Review? Does he support the call that the next iteration of that Integrated Review absolutely has to put the re-containment of Russia centre stage?”
“It is great to hear that we are training pilots, but at last week’s Munich security conference there was a clear consensus among Democrats and Republicans to send a very clear message to the President of the United States that it was time that fast jets were sent to support our allies in Ukraine. We heard directly from President Zelensky, just a few yards from this Chamber, that the wings of freedom are needed today, so let us jump out of the no and get to yes as fast as possible.”
“The truth is that both sides of the conflict will find it difficult to summon the 400,000 to 500,000 troops necessary to make a breakthrough one way or the other, so the challenge that may lie ahead is that Ukraine continues to suffer the pattern of more and more troops being thrown into infantry attacks under artillery fire in the east of the country and endless missile strikes on population centres. That is a grinding, terrible waste of life. We have to leapfrog out of this bad habit that we have gotten into where first we say no, then we say yes, with an extended time period in between. On air defence, we said no to Patriot missiles until we said yes. On tanks, we said no until, months and months later, we said yes. Now, can we please just short-circuit the process and send the F-16s as fast as possible, with trained pilots?”
“There is more to say about that, because I was unhappy to hear the Foreign Secretary, who is just leaving his place, not row in behind the Vice President of the United States and say that our Government had also arrived at the conclusion that Russia was committing crimes against humanity. One has to ask, how much more evidence do they really need? We have heard the call loud and clear from two former Prime Ministers about the need to supply what Ukraine needs now.”
“It is a great privilege to follow the excellent speech of the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), as well as that of the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), the Foreign Secretary and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy). I will add three points to the debate: first, on the importance of how we break the balance of force that we see arranged on the ground; secondly, on how we choke the oligarchs of war who are helping to supply Putin’s war machine; and thirdly, on how we commence the pursuit of justice.”
“We know that today, the Wagner Group is recruiting from prisons—it is recruiting from all over. It is mobilising forces on the eastern front in Ukraine, and frankly, it has opened a second front against democracy in Russia as well. It is active in at least five countries and has business interests in at least another 15. It is short-circuiting the sanctions regime by trading in oil, manganese, gold and uranium—you name it—so it is a matter of concern to this House that we are woefully behind the sanctions regimes that the United States and the Europeans have put in place to suffocate Prigozhin and his forces.”
“It was a shame that it took the war in Ukraine to move a little further ahead with some of the anti-kleptocracy laws that we now have, but here we are—all progress is good. There is clear evidence, however, that sanctions are being widely evaded, with goods and oil being exported to India and China, rebadged, and then re-exported from there. Given that the Treasury’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation thinks it is okay to issue sanction waivers to Prigozhin and his lawyers, I urge Treasury Front Benchers—together with the Americans, if necessary—to get a lot tougher in clamping down on that export and re-export business, because right now that business is supplying dollars that are buying weapons to support Putin. The symbol of a different order of things has to be a radically different approach to taking on the Wagner Group.”
“Every single day that we do not take that decision is a day when Putin is allowed to continue raining terror down, not just on the troops of the brave Ukrainian armed forces, but on the civilians of Ukraine. He is using that capability now to perpetrate war crimes, and we in this country have a moral responsibility to damn well stop him. Secondly, we have to move harder and faster to choke to death the oligarchs of war, starting with the dogs of war at the head of the Wagner Group. Frankly, we were too slow to implement the sanctions that we now have. I am glad that this House passed the measures with cross-party consent, basically allowing us to cut and paste the EU sanctions regime with a little bit of the American regime and to get that into place.”
“Personally, I think it would, but my key point to those on the Treasury Front Bench is: can we please short-circuit the time it takes to get from no to yes? We have gone through this loop—this doom loop—at least twice before, so let us short-circuit the nonsense now and crack on with it. The Treasury Front Benchers will find that there is cross-party consensus on that question, so please just put the decision in front of us from the Dispatch Box. Last week, we heard from the head of the Ukrainian air force that those fast jets are needed now in order to change the balance of power on the battlefield, but also to protect the population centres from Iranian drones as well as Russian cruise missiles.”
“The abuse that has been laid out has been appalling, with murder, torture, rape, deportation, executions, electrocutions and the crimes of Bucha. The sexual assault of a four-year-old child was reported to the United Nations last week. That is why all of us in this House today should welcome the statement by the vice-president of the United States last week that the US has formally determined that Russia has committed crimes against humanity. We should make the same declaration ourselves. We should do it quickly, and I hope we will hear a gameplan for just that from the Minister at the end of the debate.”
“This will surprise the House, but I am told that Mr Prigozhin has not paid his legal bills, which are about £116,000, while poor Mr Higgins has. He has had to cough up about £70,000, so perhaps the Government could do a little whip-round for Mr Higgins and supply an apology to him and to Bellingcat at the end of the debate. We have to make sure that the weapons supplies are in place and that the sanctions regime is far more effective, and the third piece of the puzzle is that we have to commence the search for justice. It is excellent that the United Kingdom has come together with its allies to ensure that there are prosecutions for war crimes, but many of us in this House will want to see prosecutions for the crime of aggression as well.”
“Finally, while we are at it, could we now end the complete scandal of the Treasury itself licensing sanction waivers for Russian warlords to fly lawyers from London to St Petersburg to summon up a case and to sue journalists such as Eliot Higgins in English courts? What a complete scandal. To top it all, Eliot Higgins was told last week that he is the security risk, and as such cannot be allowed to go to cinema showings of the new film about the brave Mr Navalny. What have we become when we are licensing English lawyers to sue English journalists in English courts? It is not good enough. It is an outrage and it needs to stop, and we need to send a clear signal from this House this afternoon that it ends now. While the Minister is at it, he might consider paying Mr Eliot Higgins’s legal bills.”
“In due course, the machine did its job and the poor Minister was summoned before us. He was not able to say when the Wagner Group was going to be sanctioned; indeed, he extracted himself from that line of questioning by saying, of course, that it was not his job but a matter for the Home Office—joined-up Government at its very best. What we have at the moment is not good enough. We need a clear plan, a clear timetable and a clear commitment from the Minister responding today that the Wagner Group will be sanctioned here, just as it is in the United States of America. We need a clear commitment that the individuals who have been sanctioned by the Americans and the European Union will also be sanctioned here.”
“That is three times as many sanctions as we have against individuals or businesses associated with Prigozhin. Let us go further. On 26 January, we heard a very clear pronouncement from our allies in the United States declaring the Wagner Group to be a proscribed organisation, because it is patently a transnational criminal organisation. That contrasts with the situation a couple of weeks ago, when the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, the hon. Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty), who is not in his place, came before the Foreign Affairs Committee. We were grateful to him for doing so, because for some time the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence could not quite decide who was the Minister responsible for taking on the Wagner Group.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The right hon. Member for South West Norfolk talked about the need for a global alliance to defend democracy—well, that global alliance has to extend to Africa. We should be concerned about the fact that the Wagner Group is now active in five countries and is poised to make something of a breakthrough in the Sahel after the French evacuation from Mali. Frankly, we should be getting a lot tougher on the Wagner Group, and that should start with a much more comprehensive sanctions regime. When the Minister winds up, I urge him to tell us that the Government will replicate the United States sanctions regime on 21 different individuals who are associated with the Wagner Group and on 16 different corporate entities.”
“Those are precisely the crimes that President Putin has committed in Ukraine, and we must make sure, just as we did in Nuremberg, that the free world comes together once more to hold him, as well as his henchmen, to account.”
“The whole of the House is grateful for the work of the right hon. and gallant Member, because we know that more people were prosecuted because of the work he did than otherwise would have been the case. He is absolutely right to say what he has said. It was 80 years ago that the free world came together to ensure the prosecution of the guilty at Nuremberg. The table of crimes presented was clear. It was crimes against humanity, and we should remind ourselves in this House exactly what that table of crimes entailed: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and persecution on political, racial and religious grounds.”
“We may as well try to round out the cross-party consensus that I think is emerging. Would the hon. Member agree that we should be doing everything we can to send fast jets to Ukraine?”
“While the Minister is going through his list, would he be good enough to explain to the House why the Americans have sanctioned three times more people associated with the Wagner Group than we have? It is a simple question.”
“They show that Prigozhin’s lawyers wanted to sue Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat because “public rebuttal of the article…is one of the reasons for his sanction designation”. The Minister signed off money for a warlord to prosecute an English journalist in an English court, to undermine the sanctions regime that he is responsible for. This is outrageous and it has to change now.”
“This is outrageous. The Minister has just confessed to the House that sanctions implementation is out of ministerial control. The result is that a waiver was issued for a warlord to sue an English journalist in an English court. Let us just be clear about the sanctions indictment that this Government issued on 31 December 2020. We sanctioned Prigozhin because he was operating “a deniable military capability for the Russian State.” Ten months later, civil servants under the Minister’s control signed off £3,500 for business-class flights, £320 for luxury accommodation at the Belmond Grand Hotel Europe, £150 for subsistence and more. Let us be clear about what the leaked emails from that conversation show.”
“I salute the Minister’s leadership on much of this agenda when he was a brilliant Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He will not, however, want to go down in history as the Minister for mañana. In his responses to the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), he has said that the timing is not right and we must wait for future Bills. Can he put our minds at rest and give us a sense of when we might expect a Bill to come forward to address the concerns of the hon. Member for Huntingdon?”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making such a brilliant speech. Among the greatest victims of economic crime right now are the people of Ukraine. One virtue of his own proposal and the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) is that they propose a shift not just to freezing assets, but to seizing assets and recycling them into the reconstruction of Ukraine. Surely we should legislate for that work now and crack on with it forthwith.”
“Is my hon. Friend scandalised as I am that at the moment only 40% of fines from economic criminals are recycled back into the business of tackling economic crime, whereas in the United States it is 100%?”
“The right hon. and learned Member is making a brilliant speech, and the proposals he is stewarding are incredibly important. Did he hear the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation’s evidence to the Bill Committee, when he said very clearly that economic crime is a national security issue? That is exactly the argument the Minister for Security made when he was Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee— [ Interruption. ] I am told he still makes that argument today. That underlines why the right hon. and learned Member’s proposals are so important, not least because we have become the country of choice for corporate structures set up to launder billions of illegal money.”
“I am incredibly grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for his generosity in giving way. We appear to have an overload of rumness here.”
“Yes. It is unusual for unity to break out on both sides of the House and on the Front and Back Benches. Given that ubiquity of unity, what, in the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s analysis, is the problem that is preventing these proposals from becoming the law of the land?”
“That is how ridiculous, corroded and broken our system has become. An exemption was licensed by a servant of the Crown to spend thousands of pounds flying lawyers to service the needs of the head of the Wagner Group in St Petersburg and to refine a lawfare case in an English court.”
“That was because openDemocracy had the temerity to expose the $8 billion siphoned off through Jusan Technologies, which is somehow now claiming that its economic interests in the UK have been damaged and therefore it is entitled to bring a case in the Royal Courts of Justice. As a result, openDemocracy and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism are forking out thousands of pounds to defend themselves against this onslaught. The situation we now have in this country is so appalling that, as we heard in the urgent question this afternoon, we have the spectacle of a Russian warlord being licensed by His Majesty’s Treasury to fly his lawyers to London to polish a case to sue an English journalist in an English court in order to undermine the sanctions this country has imposed on him.”
“Forensic News has a total of 12 subscribers in this country, yet Walter Soriano has been allowed to prosecute the case because of those 12 subscribers. Why could he possibly be doing that? Is it, as the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden described, because our legal costs are so high that the pain can be maximised by bringing a case here? We see the same in the case referred to by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) of the former rulers of Kazakhstan, who have brought a SLAPPs case against the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and openDemocracy.”
“Even though he is unable to name and specify the harm that has been done, he is seeking to bring a case for defamation. It is the flimsiest of cases anyone could imagine, yet hundreds of thousands of pounds have now been racked up in legal costs in an attempt to intimidate someone out of telling the truth. Step four is to co-ordinate with others, which we saw in particular with Mr Abramovich, who decided to round up a number of his old mates to try to bring some kind of collective action—not just in this country, by the way, but in other countries such as Australia. That was a way to double the legal costs and maximise the pain against Catherine Belton and HarperCollins. Then we have the attempts to rack up costs even though the grounds may be as flimsy as anything. Forensic News, for example, is being sued by Walter Soriano.”
“Thirdly, there is the business of exaggerating the claims: taking some aside in a bit of written material and exaggerating it ridiculously to try to multiply legal costs. We saw that in particular with Mr Abramovich in his case against Catherine Belton and HarperCollins. It was a ridiculously exaggerated claim. Of course, the objective for Mr Abramovich was not to win his case. All he sought to do was maximise the legal costs for HarperCollins and Catherine Belton. We see that now in a case in the Royal Courts of Justice, which I will not name but which I sat through a couple of weeks ago. That case is so thin. It entails an oligarch basically trying to claim that a number of emails that have been sent are in effect tantamount to a publication.”
“In most of these cases, we see an oligarch taking aim fair and square at an individual and not the corporate organisation behind them to maximise the power of intimidation. Secondly, having identified the individual, the task is to maximise the intimidation. Let us look at what Tom Burgis had to go through when he was writing his book about the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation. The bad guys whom he was trying to expose actually went to the lengths of tapping his phone and bugging him. They must have done—that was the only way in which their investigators could turn up to a secret meeting that he was having with former Government officials in a car park. Those are the lengths that these people will go to.”
“It is a playbook that all of them know and all of them follow. It is a playbook that is now predictable, and it is a playbook that we must draw to a close. We could draw it to a close this afternoon by agreeing to the amendments that we have tabled with cross-party support. The first step in the playbook is to target the individual. Do not target the company, because companies are strong and individuals are weak. That is exactly why Arron Banks went for Carole Cadwalladr. He did not want to go for The Guardian or the Scott Trust; he wanted to go for an individual journalist. That is exactly why Prigozhin, as we now learn, decided to target Eliot Higgins and not Bellingcat, because of course an individual is always more vulnerable than a corporate organisation.”
“Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), who is not in his place, and I, together with the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), have been pushing this argument for almost a year. Yesterday, the hon. Member for Isle of Wight presented to the House a first-class private Member’s Bill, which I was proud to sign. I commend the Minister for the work that he did when he was Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee on ensuring that the cancer of strategic legal action against public participants is something that we know about and are collectively determined to act on. Within the sub judice rules and exemptions that govern the debate, I can talk about some of the evidence that we now have on the record. There are now so many cases that it has become clear that there is a playbook for oligarchs.”
“Much of that information comes from whistleblowers and, crucially, from courageous journalists who are prepared to take tremendous risks and go to tremendous lengths to pursue the truth, publish the truth and hold the guilty to account. The challenge we have is that we know we cannot police economic crime without such transparency, but that old advice to journalists to follow the money in pursuit of the truth is becoming almost impossible because our courts—English courts, London courts, which were sanctuaries for justice for 1,000 years—are becoming the strike point of choice for oligarchs around the world to intimidate, to cow and to deter journalists from publishing the truth with the threat of sky-high legal costs. My friend the right hon.”
“It is a pleasure to speak to new clauses 1 and 2 in my name and those of many others, and it is a pleasure to follow so many excellent contributions to the debate. I hope it has become clear that there is a wide and deep cross-party consensus about the need to take this overdue Bill and repower it with not only good laws but proper resourcing so that we can begin to ensure that economic criminals in this country are put under rather more pressure. A lot is in a name, and the Bill’s name is the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill. As the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) pointed out, what is crucial to ensuring the corporate transparency we need to police economic crime is information.”