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.”
The complete record
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“He made sure that at the core of every single one of his campaigns were the stories, because we have all been educated in the legend of Joe and Josephine Soap in the Dog and Duck in Erdington. He also brought to all his campaigns not just the art of coalition building but incredible calm, along with persistence. He used to very proudly say that his nickname in the union was “Never snap, never flap Jack”, and he reminded me of that very often as I was losing my rag over the last year and a half. On the last day of Jack’s life we were working together on a book about the future of our great region, the heart of Britain, and as ever he brought to that an extraordinary optimism. He put the green industrial revolution at the core of what he wrote, and this is what he wrote: “I am passionate in my belief that change is possible.”
“His campaigns in Birmingham are innumerable: he fought for more police numbers, he fought for covid families, he fought for the food bank, he fought for Erdington High Street, he fought for manufacturing jobs, he fought for the factory at GKN—and this was all just in the last week of his life. As you will know, Mr Speaker, Jack brought a particular approach to all his campaigns. It generally started with a very, very long list of bullet points, and Jack would start off by saying, “Just three points”, and we would tease him as he got to, “And seventeenthly”, but he brought to every single one of his campaigns what he used to fondly say was a certain “je ne sais quoi”.”
“Jack Dromey was my mentor, my teacher, my political partner and my friend for almost a decade and a half in Birmingham. Like for many of us here today he was like a father to me; indeed, he was at school with my dad, at Cardinal Vaughan in west London, part of that extraordinary generation of second-generation Irish kids: sharp, chippy, pushing, determined to make a contribution to social justice. It didn’t always start smoothly: my godfather, Spud Murphy, then a prefect at Cardinal Vaughan, used to talk to me fondly about having to give Jack a clip round the ear for smoking behind the bike sheds at school. But Jack was not a rebel without a cause: his cause was social justice, and he fought for it his entire life. His glorious life was one long crusade for the underdog; he fought for them whenever and wherever he found them.”
“This is surely a new low: a Prime Minister of our country forced to come here to the mother of Parliaments to plead the fifth in a criminal investigation because, if the truth were told, he knows it would incriminate him. Let me ask a simple question. If he cannot get his facts straight on whether he was at a party in his own flat, how will anyone in this House ever again believe a word he says, and how will our partners around the world ever put their trust in him?”
“I speak for the whole of the Bromford tonight when I say that we are looking forward to answers from the Minister.”
“Finally, we would like to know how on earth this has all cost £26 million of taxpayers’ money, and we would like to know, please, how much extra is being shelled out because of the delays. You will forgive me, Mr Deputy Speaker, for feeling strongly about this, but while we have had a Prime Minister partying in Downing Street, the children of my constituents have been denied a play park on their estate during covid. I do not think that is acceptable and I am here to say to the House that we are not having it. I am sorry that we have had to ask the Minister to come to the House. It is a last resort and a measure that I have taken in desperation, because I am determined that the people of the Bromford are going to be treated like first-class citizens and get the respect and the investment they deserve from this Government.”
“Secondly, we would like compensation in the form of new investment in new parks on the estate. Thirdly, we would like a commitment that work under way on the timetable now agreed will not be delayed. We want it specified not in terms of a season, but to the nearest date. Fourthly, we would like a commitment to transforming communications with our community. We have that from the local staff from the Environment Agency, but I want to be sure that we get the back-up from the higher-ups in the Environment Agency, so that that commitment is made real, and I would like the chief executive of the Environment Agency to come to the Bromford estate and actually front this up in person with the residents of the Bromford.”
“I have asked the Minister to come to the House today because, in my letters to the chief executive of the Environment Agency, the answers were inadequate, and they were answered by a junior official in the agency. Frankly, if that is the way that the Environment Agency is going to treat Privy Counsellors in Britain’s second city, what hope, frankly, do residents have of getting a straight answer? Our asks are very simple. First, we would like the Minister to give us an apology—just to say sorry for this saga and the denial of our park to our children for the past two years during lockdown. If we can build a Commonwealth games stadium in Birmingham on time and on budget, the Environment Agency should be able to bring a play park to completion on schedule.”
“In answer to my written question of 17 September 2021, the promise came that the Environment Agency was “fully committed to completing this scheme at the earliest opportunity”— and the Minister said that the Environment Agency ensured that the multi-use games area and skate park were going to be handed back, along with the under-12s play area at the start of the summer holidays. But the play park is still closed. I then had to convene everybody on 5 November 2021 to make sure that we had a 10-point plan that everybody had signed up for, and we now have an agreement that the park will be made available in the spring of 2022. This is a terrible saga of the mismanagement of a project. We have good people such as Jimmy and Imky on the ground from the Environment Agency, but frankly, they are clearly good people in bad systems.”
“The work, the letter said, would restart shortly, but “To allow us to do this safely we will need to close the Skate park in addition to the play park. The park will be closed for approximately 7 weeks”. The letter promised that it would be reopened in time for the 2021 summer holidays. The next communication was dated 14 July 2021. We now learnt that the Environment Agency had issued an updated programme advising that the flood defence works would not be substantially completed until the end of March 2022, and it would not be returning control of housing sites before the end of October 2021. That knock-on cost pushed back the housing proposals by a couple of years and put up the cost by 10% to £3.2 million. At that point, in exasperation, I started tabling questions to the Minister.”
“That was putting it mildly. At that point, we were promised that the existing play facilities would be reopened in late July 2021. We also learnt at that time—this was just as bad—that the council would not have unfettered access to the housing development sites, as it had been promised, because the Environment Agency had decided to use the site as a compound for the work that it was undertaking. As a result, the council had to brief me that “The delays to the flood defence works will delay the Housing development programme and the associated play area and open space improvements.” A few days later, on 1 April 2021, local residents were sent a letter stating: “We had a break in our embankment construction work”.”
“The first details were confirmed to us on 22 June 2020. That is when we got a green light from Birmingham City Council to co-invest alongside the new flood defence work. The completion date was to be March 2021; that was the promise. It was at about that time that the Environment Agency told us that it would remove the under-12s play park in Bromford Drive. We were pretty unhappy about that, but we were given an assurance that new parks would be provided within the next two years. The next update was just nine months later, but we were then told that the entire project was running 12 months late. New project sponsors were brought in. There were clearly a host of problems. I was advised by the city council that “The new Environment Agency Project Team have freely acknowledged communication has to date been inadequate”.”
“The River Tame does not flood very often; it floods, to a serious level, perhaps once in a century, but that will obviously have a devastating impact on the communities of the Bromford and, indeed, Castle Vale. The flood defences were important, and they help us to unlock new housing development, which in turn is a catalyst for renewal. However, we wanted to bring the Environment Agency into a real partnership with Birmingham City Council and our community organisations, so that this was not money dropped in from above, with the investment made and agencies then just disappearing. We wanted a true partnership in which we worked together as a team to overhaul the estate with the investment that was provided. That was the dream, but the reality was very different. With the House’s indulgence, I will, very quickly, share the chronology.”
“They are people like Tim Evans of Worth Unlimited, which has transformed youth work on the estate; people like Paul Wright of the Open Door Community Foundation, which has created, in The Hub, a real anchor for the community; people like Phil Howkins, one of the driving forces behind the new pantomimes we have at Christmas; people like Flo Parkes, Clare Maclean, Linda Dunkley and her daughter Charlotte Dunkley. They have together not only done the good, hard work of community-building, whether it involves pop-up parks or organising festivals, but created a vision for the estate—the Bromford village vision of a place where we get the investment we deserve, and renew the sense of community. That is why we gave such a warm welcome to the prospect of Environment Agency investment in the flood defences along the River Tame.”
“We were successful in bringing in more than £1 million of big local funding over a long period of many years to help build up community initiatives. We have now secured tens of millions of pounds for a transformation of housing on the estate, and it will also be home to the new retrofitting pilot which, as chair of the East Birmingham inclusive growth taskforce, I have helped to deliver. We still have miles to go if this proud estate is to gain the investment and the attention that it deserves, but we are blessed with the most extraordinary wealth of community leaders and community activists who are, together, determined to renew the bonds that connect the neighbours on the estate.”
“I know that the Minister will have studied her brief and will have come to the House as an expert on the Bromford estate, but should that not be the case, let me just very quickly set the context for the House. The Bromford estate is built along the great River Tame, where once its mills were recorded in the Domesday Book. It was of course the home of the Birmingham racetrack until the 1960s, whereupon, to provide greater housing for Birmingham, the Bromford estate was built on new town principles along what is actually the longest bridge in the country—the great M6 viaduct. However, for years the estate has suffered neglect, and I have made it a mission for my time in the House to campaign for the investment that it deserves. We started with £10 million-worth of new health centre in the Firs, towards the east end of the estate.”
“I am very grateful for the opportunity to bring to the attention of the House the disgraceful story of the prevarication, delay and disrespect from the Environment Agency towards the good residents of the Bromford estate in my constituency of Birmingham, Hodge Hill. The upshot of this terrible saga is that the overrunning of flood defence work denied those from one of the poorest communities in Birmingham access to their public park for two years throughout the length of lockdown. This estate has one of the worst health outcomes in the west midlands, yet throughout the pandemic and throughout this health crisis the green space that was the preserve of our community was fenced off and denied to residents and their children.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. She has just slipped the timetable back two months on the assurance that I was given on 5 November, so I hope that she will be able to re-check that with her officials. The broad point I wanted to make is that the project management arrangements have been among the worst I have ever seen. For example, the collapse of the wall was communicated to me only about two months ago, long after the fact. May I therefore urge her to ensure that she is doing everything she can to ensure that integrated project management arrangements on such complex schemes are much tighter and that communication with local residents affected by the works is an awful lot better?”
“The Mayor of the West Midlands and I disagree on much, but I think he buys into my argument that we should be the green workshop of the world, and I agree with him that delivering on that requires radical devolution of resources and powers in at least 12 different areas, from skills to energy regulation. Has the Minister read the submission from the combined authorities—the Mayor and the seven mighty authorities of the west midlands—and, crucially, when the levelling-up White Paper is delivered, will he deliver on it?”
“Once upon a time, wars were fought on land, in the air and at sea, but no more. Hybrid war is a battle for minds as much as it is for land—for influence and narrative, not simply territory. That means it extends the battlefront to space, to cyber-space and, now, to law space. It is fought with tweets as well as tanks, and now it is being fought with writs as one more weapon in the armoury. Of course, the reason for this is simple: what totalitarians, autocrats and kleptocrats fear most is the truth, so what they are seeking to do is to murder the truth, and we are letting them do it in English courts.”
“It is a real privilege and an honour to follow the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) to help open this debate and to follow on from his arguments. “Follow the money” is the oldest and wisest advice given to journalists who are pursuing the corrupt, shining lights where they need to be shone and hunting the truth, yet this dictum, which has served us so well since Watergate, is now being smothered, suffocated and strangled in courts by allies, associates and friends of President Putin, who is pursuing a hybrid war against the west and against us. That is the context for the debate that we are holding this afternoon. Many of us in this House have been warning for some years that it is time for this country to wake up to this new threat. Hybrid war is a novel kind of conflict.”
“Time and again, we have heard in our research about the behaviour of Hugh Tomlinson, Geraldine Proudler, Carter-Ruck, Mishcon de Reya, Schillings, CMS and Olswang, and it is now time for the regulatory body to pass new rules to ensure these firms follow a good model of litigation principles that ensures rules of good conduct and even liability for clients who refuse to pay their bills when they lose their case, like Major Karpov.”
“Secondly, we need a public figure defence, as America has, so a person who sues a public figure has a much higher bar to clear and needs to be able to prove actual malice. Thirdly, we need a sanctions regime against vexatious litigants, which could include paying 100% of costs or even punitive costs, to deter the misuse of our courts that we are now seeing. Fourthly, we need a defamation defence fund on the lines proposed by President Biden, and I humbly suggest that it should be funded by a windfall tax on the law firms making millions from the misuse of our courts.”
“It is not simply libel law being abused, as Bill Browder was attacked using cross-border insolvency legislation. We have heard how GDPR is now being misused by oligarchs. I was the shadow Minister on the Public Bill Committee on the Data Protection Act 2018, and I can expressly tell the House that it was not the intention of the previous Parliament for the Act to be used in this malicious way. The new anti-corruption strategy and the economic crime plan that the Government have to refresh need to include five quick provisions. First, we need what are known as SLAPP-back laws so that a judge can rapidly dismiss a case if it is designated as strategic legal action against public participants.”
“We have heard from regulators who fear judicial review because a subject access request might come in from representatives of organised crime groups that are seeking banking licences. This is complete madness. Perhaps there are perfectly innocent explanations for all this, and maybe I have too suspicious a mind, but I would like to know the truth. I want newspapers and investigators to be able to hunt down the truth and, where necessary, publish it. That is why we need action and we need it now. We are still governed by the great European Magna Carta that we wrote in the 1950s, the European convention on human rights. It establishes a positive obligation to safeguard the freedom of a pluralist media and to create a favourable environment for participation in public debate. We are failing to uphold that duty.”
“Gentleman said, that Mr Amersi’s associate, friend, colleague and lunching partner, Carl Hunter, threatened a former Member of Parliament, Charlotte Leslie, that without an apology to Mr Amersi the case had “all possibility of going further to a really gruesome stage.” What on earth is going on in this country when people like this are able to issue threats to anyone, never mind former Members of this House? And still Mr Amersi thinks he can go to a four-day trial and take Ms Leslie to court. We still do not know the origin of Mr Banks’s donations to Leave.EU. When the Electoral Commission warned about the poor National Crime Agency investigation, Mr Banks sued the Electoral Commission and forced it to take down a statement about his lies.”
“On Monday I shared intelligence with the House from sources inside the Kremlin and the Russian Government, including information about one of Mr Amersi’s business partners, a man called Leonard Bogdan, who sources tell me has “a definite FSB background.” I now learn that Mr Bogdan’s daughter works for the Conservative party’s central office and—surprise, surprise—was briefly secretary of Conservative Friends of the Middle East and North Africa. We then learned, as the right hon.”
“Catherine Belton’s case cost well over £1.5 million, and it would have cost millions more if it had gone any further. Carole Cadwalladr’s case is costing hundreds of thousands of pounds. Major Karpov’s case against Bill Browder left Mr Browder with a bill of £600,000, which the plaintiff has not paid because when he lost his case, lo and behold, he subsequently disappeared. Democracy’s watchdogs are having their tongues cut out and our writers are having their writing fingers broken. The result is that suspicion multiplies and the risk of corruption grows. I am so glad that the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden has put before the House details of Mr Mohamed Amersi, which is a case in point.”
“There are extraordinary exaggerations and twisting of what has actually been written. Step four is to co-ordinate the claims with others to maximise intimidation and, indeed, legal costs. Catherine Belton was subject to an onslaught first from the Alpha group, then from Abramovich, then from Mikhail Fridman, then from Shalva Chigirinsky, then from Pyotr Aven, and then from Rosneft—and we are being invited to believe that somehow this was unco-ordinated. They must think we are complete idiots. Step five, as we have heard, is to file claims in multiple jurisdictions—an example is Mr Abramovich’s suit against HarperCollins in Australia—to maximise the cost for journalists, writers and their publishers. The impact is the creation of legal bills that are so big that they chill and kill the truth.”
“At one stage, I have been told, Elizabeth Denham, who was the Information Commissioner at the height of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, was warned by counter-terrorism officers that MI5 had evidence that she was under active intrusive surveillance ordered by Mr Arron Banks, so her office had to be swept. Others have told us about the “hack and leak” technique whereby systems are hacked into, and information is then leaked to serve as a trigger for defamation proceedings. Step three is then to file the most ludicrously exaggerated claims. Mr Abramovich’s attack on Catherine Belton took completely out of context what Ms Belton had actually written. We know that Tom Burgis has been attacked because he is alleged to have said that a corporate entity had ordered the murders.”
“Surely that must tell us that something in our country is going badly wrong. Step two is to maximise intimidation, using covert surveillance if necessary. As we have heard, investigators and journalists are now being inundated with data subject access requests so that people who are up to no good can smoke out what they are up to. ENRC agents surveilled Tom Burgis, who was in a meeting that had been arranged on an encrypting messaging app; how on earth did it know about that? The Financial Times journalist Dan McCrum, who helped to break the Wirecard story, was subject to online abuse, hacking, electronic eavesdropping and physical surveillance. These people know no boundaries. They are completely out of control.”
“Gentleman’s speech—what might be described as the oligarch’s playbook. Step one is to target the individual, not the organisation, because the individual is most vulnerable, and take aim at the slightest error. Arron Banks did not go for The Guardian or The Observer ; he went for Carole Cadwalladr, and took aim at a single sentence in her TED talk. As we have heard, ENRC went after Tom Burgis personally after he flagged up the information that witnesses to its crimes were being murdered. Paul Radu, who happens to be Romanian, is being pursued in English courts by corrupt Azerbaijani politicians. We have to ask: why are powerful interests from far away suing journalists who are not English and do not write for English titles? Why are they being sued in English courts?”
“Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), is present—that made clear on, I believe, page 22 of its landmark report on Russia that the interests of Russian business are now so closely entwined with the interests of the Russian state that it is impossible to unravel them. It is these honourable folk who are now using English courts as their preferred location for the business of truth silencing. According to a survey of 63 journalistsin 41 countries, more cases were brought against journalists in the UK than in America and Europe combined.As theright hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden said, the United States and Europe are now moving to shut this down, but we are not. That is why we are now becoming the global capital of the lawfare industry. There are now so many cases that today we can reveal—it was evident in the right hon.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I will come on that in a moment. The truth is that the truth is under attack by oligarchs with Russian connections because they are seeking to disguise the origin of their fortunes, their methods of business and, of course, their networks of friends. The result is that the frontline of this hybrid war now stetches from the streets of Donbass and Crimea and the troll farms of St Petersburg to the law courts of Britain—our courts, in England, here in London. It was the Intelligence and Security Committee—whose distinguished Chair, theright hon.”
“Every day, urgently, incessantly, patiently, friends of Mr Putin are trying to push the frontiers of that kleptosphere into Ukraine, the Balkans, Cyprus, Malta and the Baltics, and, yes, into Britain. It is pushed forward by attacking the weakest brick in our defences, and we in this House must ensure that our courts never become vectors for our country’s opposition. For nearly 1,000 years, our courts have been sanctuaries of justice, but now they are becoming arenas of silence, places in which the truth is killed. It was Václav Havel who said that the greatest defence against totalitarians is to live “in truth”. That is also the greatest defence against kleptocrats. I want to live in truth, which is why I say to the Minister: it is now time for the Government to act.”
“The hon. Gentleman is right on that. When we welcomed the integrated review and the rhetoric of “global Britain”, what none of us intended was that “global Britain” meant London becoming the capital of the global lawfare industry, yet we know about the profits that are being made by some of these firms, which, as the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden eloquently said, are now carving out a big fat niche for themselves. In conclusion, once upon a time Mr Churchill warned about an “iron curtain” descending across our continent, from Stettin in the north to Trieste in the south. The challenge for our generation is very different. A kleptosphere is taking shape, stretching from Kaliningrad in the west to Kamchatka in the east.”
“The hon. Gentleman is doing an immense service to the House by bringing his expertise to this debate. I agree that we need to be circumspect, and to empower judges to deal with abuse of courts. Judges know an abuse of court when they see one. In Major Karpov’s case, he was being paid £15,000 to £20,000 a year in Russia, but could somehow afford lawyers who cost £600 an hour. There must be some kind of weakness there, which we need to fix if we are to ensure that lawyers can genuinely understand the source of the money that is paying their bills.”
“The hon. Gentleman is being incredibly generous. I underline that the Ministry of Justice is out for consultation on reform of the Human Rights Act 1998, which helps to enshrine the ECHR. Does he agree that it is absolutely essential that there is no backsliding on our obligations to preserve a pluralist media environment with vigorous public debate and the cherishing of free speech?”
“This has been one of the most remarkable debates that I have sat through in 18 years in the House. The issue is extremely serious, there has been a high level of cross-party consensus and immense practical detail has been offered. I have been in the Minister’s position, when there is turbulence at the top. I urge him to keep his head down and to plough on. We cannot afford anything less. Thirty-two years ago, President Gorbachev came to the Council of Europe and talked about his dream of a common European home and a single legal space, our great gift to the world. That dream is now shattered, but that means that we have a special obligation in this country, as the home of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, to be a beacon and a champion of freedom, rights and free speech. That is the challenge to which the Minister must now rise.”
“Although it is important that we take Russian security concerns seriously, we must resist at all costs any attempts by Russia to re-imperialise eastern Europe. May I press the Secretary of State on two dimensions of his twin-track strategy? First, how ready is NATO to accede to requests to join not only from Finland but from countries in the western Balkans and Georgia, so that any tactical advance into Ukraine is a strategic defeat? Secondly, will the Secretary of State say a word about the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, because it is hard to envisage an arms control framework for Europe without some measure of control over ground-launched cruise missiles—even if they are non-nuclear—on the continent of Europe?”
“Mr Amersi made a fortune helping to sell PeterStar to a Luxembourg-based company, which—surprise, surprise—turned out to controlled by Leonid Rieman, who was none other than President Putin’s former telecoms Minister. Coincidence? You be the judge, Mr Deputy Speaker.”
“Let us take another honourable donor, Mr Mohamed Amersi, a man who together with his partner has given nearly £800,000 to good causes and who, it would seem, might qualify for a walk-on part in John le Carré’s “The Night Manager”, but not as Jonathan Pine. Information I have seen from well-placed sources in the Kremlin shows that Mr Amersi is an associate and business partner of people with all sorts of friends, including some with close connections to the SVR and FSB. They include Yuri Lopatinsky, Ernst Stauffer, and Aleksandr Barunin, with whom Mr Amersi worked on several telecom deals, including the takeover of Megafon, the firm later accused by the Georgians of “illegal business operations and participation in the military and economic annexation of Georgia”.”
“Thanks to evidence given to Carole Cadwalladr and the heroic reporting of The Guardian , we know that there are all kinds of interesting and no doubt innocent connections, such as the fact that Mr Banks’s wife, Katya Banks, was given entry into the country on a passport serially numbered to a passport given to someone who MI5 reported as a Russian spy. That is no doubt completely innocent, but the fact is that, when the National Crime Agency dropped its investigation into the source of the money, it left the source of the money shrouded in mystery. The Electoral Commission was so alarmed that it issued a warning that it could open the floodgates to donations from offshore. Let me underline why the national security assessment is important to those on the Opposition Benches, but should be of importance to the Conservative party, too.”
“They would insist that party donations must come from profits made here in the UK, and they would establish a new regime that would allow the Electoral Commission to call in donations for an assessment on national security grounds. As it happens, the Government have just introduced precisely that regime for investments in critical national infrastructure. What infrastructure in this country could be more important than the essence of our democracy itself? We have heard warnings from Chatham House, the Intelligence and Security Committee and from Lord Evans this weekend that our system of party funding is now wide open. We have heard and debated in this House the example of Mr Banks, Leave.EU and the mysterious source of his gigantic loans from Rock Services—or was it Rock Holdings?”
“I rise to speak to new clause 16, in my name and that of Members from four of the parties represented here in Westminster. We tabled the new clause because the Bill has many flaws, but among the worst is the lack of any attempt to clean up the laundromat of British politics, which is now awash with dark money from dubious sources. We cannot in good conscience now pretend we are unaware. The Government can no longer plead ignorance or innocence: they are either careless or culpable and we in this House cannot tolerate the situation for a moment longer. That is why the amendments we are moving are so important. Our Pandora amendments are simple.”
“We have allowed this regime for donations and investments in critical national infrastructure; we now need to bring in that regime to clean up the laundromat of British political funding. Time does not allow me to highlight further coincidences—”
“Mr Amersi, it is said, dealt directly with Hudsotrade and two of the shareholders, who were later sanctioned. Despite those connections, however, correspondence that I have seen shows that Mr Amersi was asked to chair COMENA—Conservative Friends of Middle East and North Africa—a new political interface between the Conservative party and the middle east established “on the authorisation of CCHQ”. Mr Amersi says that he had a half-hour chat with officials from the Conservative party before writing his cheques, but on the basis of the evidence to which I have drawn attention today, I think we would all benefit from the Electoral Commission’s being empowered to call in donations for a national security audit.”
“My hon. Friend is right and he will horrified to hear that there is more. Perhaps the most concerning of Mr Amersi’s connections is Leonard Bogdan, a man with very interesting friends in the FSB and the SVR. Mr Bogdan was a minor partner in Tempbank, which held Soviet Union Communist party assets and then specialised in covert foreign transfers. The bank was associated with several Syrian citizens supplying arms to Syria and Iran and was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2014. But Tempbank also helped to facilitate another sanctioned firm, Hudsotrade, which dealt with Russian arms and ammunition suppliers. Sources inside the Russian Government say that Mr Amersi was involved in these deals, providing finance from Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, along with private clients from Syria and Iran, to help exports into the middle east.”
“The only slight issue is that Mr Temerko is the man who used to operate at the very top of the Russian arms industry, with connections high up in the Kremlin—but, of course, Mr Temerko is an honourable man. He works with another honourable man, Mr Fedotov, who is a key shareholder in Aquind Ltd, which, The Guardian reports, has donated £700,000 to the Conservative party, along with another firm. This is, unfortunately, the same Mr Fedotov who, according to the Pandora papers, has revealed that his fortune was made through an offshore financial structure in the mid-2000s, at about the time when it was alleged to have been siphoning funds from the Russian state pipeline company Transneft. But, of course, Mr Fedotov is an honourable man.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The point is that I can raise questions here that warrant further investigation—questions about, for example, Lubov Chernukhin, the model of generosity who has given the Conservatives £2.1 million, £1.9 million of it after her husband Vladimir—the same Vladimir who was appointed by Mr Putin’s deputy chairman of Vnesheconombank—received money from Suleiman Kerimov. This was a man who was later sanctioned by the United States Treasury, and not only for being a Russian Government official: he was arrested in France for smuggling in hundreds of millions of euros in suitcases. Then there is Mr Temerko, another honourable man, who has donated £1.2 million to the Conservative party. I am told that the Prime Minister’s whiff-whaff bats are on the wall of his reception room.”