Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2017-12-06
Topic: Law and Crime
Sharon Bowles (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, my noble friend Lady Kramer and I gave notice that this schedule should not stand part of the Bill. I would like noble Lords to take a few moments in private to give the schedule the "read it out aloud" test. Let us try one bit of it now. Paragraph 4 says: "Require prescribed persons to take prescribed measures in relation to their customers in prescribed circumstances" All the prescribing is yet to be defined. I am sorry to appear light-hearted, but I can imagine that coming out of the mouths of comedians. Truly, I do not know whether the schedule is sinister or whether it just fails to understand how the money laundering regulations 2017 work. It is sinister if you look at the scope of the powers, which gives opportunity for boundless increase in who can be covered and ignores any proportionality or safeguards that are included in the current law It is no use pointing to the reference to the current regulations, which appears in paragraph 20, because that is basically there only to give power for them all to be rewritten, amended or revoked—so there are no guarantees for anything. It is worth having a quick look at paragraph 20, which starts: "Without prejudice to anything in section 41, paragraphs 1 to 19 or section 44(2), regulations under section 41 may" We have to remember that Schedule 2 starts: "Without prejudice to the generality of section 41" So we have a paragraph that starts with three mentions of "without prejudice", reinforcing that a whole lot of other stuff is expected to be going on. Paragraph 20 then says: "(a) subject to any modifications the appropriate Minister making the regulations considers appropriate, make provision corresponding or similar to any provision of the Money Laundering Regulations 2017, as those Regulations have effect immediately before they are saved by section 2 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2017; (b) amend or revoke the Money Laundering Regulations 2017" It says that you can make provisions corresponding or similar to, or revoke. If that, together with the three references to "without prejudice" is not giving notice that you intend to completely rewrite them, then I really do not know what is. This is, as I have said before, a big part of the problem. It is sinister when looked at that way There is also a failure to understand, or at least to commit to, how the money laundering regulations 2017 work. That misunderstanding or failure to acknowledge is there by virtue of the very structure of Schedule 2. It is upside down, starting with the person, moving on to supervisors and leaving out duties of government. It does not seem to appreciate the cascade of risk assessment that drives automatic updating of the nature of risks from the Treasury and Home Office, to supervisors and then on to the persons. The list of powers seems to have been composed by lifting a short part-sentence here and there from individual sub-regulations, ignoring any safeguards including, as I said, the surrounding cascade methodology. The part-sentences are then turned into a list of naked powers that have already received criticism from the Delegated Powers Committee in paragraph 36 of its report. I commend reading that paragraph to noble Lords; it highlights and criticises the unrestricted power over persons, the powers to create supervisors with investigatory powers, the powers to prohibit the carrying on of business and power to impose unlimited fines and criminal offences—all without limit save for the sentencing limits It would stretch your Lordships’ patience, especially at this hour, if I went through each paragraph to show its origins and what is missing—although I could do that, if noble Lords wanted. I will just illustrate the pattern with one paragraph but, as I have said, it is a repeating pattern. Paragraph 2(1) requires "prescribed persons"—the yet to be defined prescribed persons— "to identify and assess risks relating to money laundering, terrorist financing and other threats to the integrity of the international financial system" That actually sounds like a pretty good definition of what the Financial Action Task Force was set up to do. The Minister can by regulation make anyone—some small accountant, lawyer or bookkeeper, you, me, the doorkeeper, a schoolteacher—do it all, not forgetting unlimited fines for getting it wrong. Am I being ridiculous? Well, no, because there is no mention of the category of person or it being about their own or a relevant business. Where does this wording come from? Let us look at Regulation 18(1) of the 2017 regulations, entitled: "Risk assessment by relevant persons" It starts: "A relevant person must take appropriate steps to identify and assess the risks of money laundering and terrorist financing to which its business is subject" Spot the missing bits. It has to be "appropriate steps" relating to its own business. The "relevant person" is not open-ended either, because there is a list of relevant persons in Regulation 8.