Sanctions — House of Commons, 2022-02-22
Topic: International Affairs
Thomas Georg John Tugendhat (Conservative, Centre-right): 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.