Criminal Finances Bill — House of Commons, 2017-04-26
Topic: Law and Crime
Rupa Asha Huq (Labour, Centre-left): I rise to speak on behalf of Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition for the final occasion in the current Parliament The Minister talked about cross-party co-operation and Labour’s Bribery Act 2010, which the Bill builds on, as well as the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. We welcome all the Government’s technical amendments, because we want a Bill that works and prevents financial crime We all remember the heady days of 2016, when the Bill was first announced. We remember the headlines about the possibility that the assets of human rights abusers who bought London homes would be seized and all the rhetoric about cleaning up dirty money. We welcome the Bill and we are happy to support the amendments, most of which are technical and will ensure that some measures in the Bill will work more effectively. They perform a tidying-up function. We particularly support the measures that are intended to ensure that unexplained wealth orders cannot be circumvented through trusts or other complex financial arrangements, and we welcome the thought that has gone into the specific arrangements for the devolved Governments in Scotland and Northern Ireland. We in the Labour party hope that the return of an inclusive devolved Government in Northern Ireland will be achieved as soon as possible Let me now say something about Lords amendment 34. Throughout the Bill’s passage through the House of Commons, we have consistently returned to the elephant in the room: beneficial ownership and transparency in the United Kingdom’s overseas territories and Crown dependencies. I do not want to restate all the arguments—there is no time for me to do so, because we all have to go back to our constituencies and prepare for power, do we not?—but I believe that my position, and that of the Labour party, is clear. Labour believes that the Government have a moral duty to ensure that our overseas territories and Crown dependencies adopt publicly accessible registers of beneficial ownership to prevent them from being at the global epicentre of illicit financial practices, which damage developing countries and the world economy. They contribute to geopolitical instability, and they do our reputation harm as well. We have seen headlines that, while not suggesting that dead bodies can be seen piling up on the streets of London, make it clear that malpractices have been taking place The argument can run and run, and we can have another day for it, but I take heart from the Government’s realisation that a step in the right direction on the long and winding road is ensuring that the new arrangements for information sharing between the relevant territories and the UK’s enforcement agencies are subject to an open and transparent review. Territories such as the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands have been astute. They are very clever at using what are essentially tokenistic, box-ticking consultations—soi-disant, in inverted commas—to argue that compliance, competitiveness and security concerns hamper their adoption of centralised and closed registers of beneficial ownership. They do that because they know they can get away with it. They know that having a centralised, as opposed to a decentralised, platform brings them one step closer to laying the foundations for a public register in the future. That is the holy grail. That is what is at the end of the rainbow—what we are all looking for The Government’s concession on the issue is much appreciated, but I believe that the original Labour amendment would have been a far more effective vehicle for assessing the substance of the overseas territories’ claims that they are unable to have public registers of beneficial ownership owing to those compliance, security and competitiveness concerns—all the pretexts and excuses that are being wheeled out. We firmly believe that this is a missed opportunity for Britain. The systems of British overseas territories and Crown dependencies allow tax avoidance on what some people describe as an industrial scale. It does go on, and we cannot pretend that it does not. The Government’s unwillingness to support our position on registers of beneficial ownership is unforgivable. Sadly, it shows that the Conservative party is not serious enough about money laundering. It could do better. We used to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime—indeed, we still are—but the Conservatives could be tougher on financial crime. They are not as tough as they would have us believe.