Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill — House of Lords, 2022-03-14
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Martin Callanan (Conservative, Centre-right): First, I thank noble Lords for their comments. I do not disagree with the sentiments of a lot of what has been said. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, that I absolutely appreciate the points that he has made. This is a very complicated and technical area of law, and I assure noble Lords that we have gone into it in great detail. This morning, I met my noble friend Lord Wolfson, who is a trusts expert, to go through the provisions, and I have examined them closely with Treasury and BEIS officials We are doing this to close potential loopholes in trusts; the Government have no other agenda here. This is a difficult area. HMRC has recently established a trusts register for UK trusts, and we want to try to make sure that the same visibility exists for overseas trusts. If an overseas trust buys UK property, its interest is clearly covered and will need to be declared, but there is a potential problem with an overseas entity holding a property, and then that being owned by a trust. It is an attempt to control and close those particular loopholes in this complicated area of law, and what I totally accept are complicated amendments have been worked on at great pace to try to do that. So there is no difficulty and no difference between any of us in what we are trying to achieve with this legislation I also happily concede that we may not have got every last dot and comma absolutely accurate and right. One point that my noble friend made to me this morning was that we are if not the first then possibly the second in the world to attempt to do something like this, and it will be an iterative process—it is fair to accept that. A lot of international lawyers and others will be carefully studying this legislation and trying to find ways around it. I can certainly say that, if there are loopholes and if something is presented that we think needs closing, we will absolutely do that, if necessary, in the next Bill—although the full extent of the legislation may not be visible at that stage. But we are committed to doing this, providing that information and giving law enforcement the opportunity carefully to scrutinise many of these arrangements In particular, I give the assurance that the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and possibly my noble friend Lord Cormack, were looking for: the further economic crime Bill, which the Government intend to introduce in the next Session, will be broad. We will, of course, carefully examine and consider any amendments proposed in either House that serve to strengthen our framework for tackling economic crime. I know from my long experience in this House that noble Lords will not be shy in coming forward where they can see improvements that could be made to legislation and where they identify any potential loopholes. There are some fine minds in this House and I am sure that they, along with some of our excellent officials, will turn their attention to doing just that I agree with the sentiments; there is no difference between us and what we want to try to achieve, and I am grateful in particular to the opposition parties’ Front Benches, with whom I have had extensive discussions, for their forbearance. I will happily concede that this is not necessarily emergency legislation; we have been trying to introduce this register for a while but until now it has not managed to get the prominence in the public sphere and sufficient priority in the legislative programme to allow it to be brought before this House. As the Minister responsible for it in the House and in my department, I am grateful that we have now managed finally to bring it forward. It will be a useful tool of transparency and of benefit to, first of all, the public, and then to the law enforcement community in attempting to target the small minority of overseas entities that hold property in the UK. Something like 59,000 overseas entities hold property, and the vast majority do so for perfectly legitimate, lawful and legal reasons—but within that there is, of course, a tiny minority we all want to target, and this is our transparency contribution to an attempt to do just that I move on to look at the amendments in detail. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Fox, and my noble friend Lord Agnew, for their Amendment 17. I am grateful for the meeting that I was able to have with my noble friend Lord Agnew earlier to talk about this issue. As I said, I can see the good intent behind this amendment, but it would be ineffective as tabled—and I shall explain why It does not fit within the legislative scheme of the Bill. For example, the Bill provides five conditions for "beneficial owner" in Part 2 of Schedule 2. These five conditions, in general terms, relate to shareholdings, rights or control over legal entities, or other arrangements. Amendment 17 seeks to apply the term "beneficial owner" in the context of a qualifying estate—that is, the land itself—which would not work. Further, the amendment fails to empower overseas entities to obtain the information required which, for the most part, remains undefined To be clear, this Bill was designed specifically to capture the beneficial owners of overseas entities. This is because, if the land is held in the name of an overseas entity registered in a jurisdiction with poor levels of corporate transparency, law enforcement agencies here may struggle when investigating the affairs of someone of interest. If they cannot obtain information about the entity itself, they will almost certainly never be able to identify any ultimate economic beneficiary of the land. This register aims to ensure that investigators can find out about the overseas entity to further their investigations. There may be a wider policy debate to be had about capturing ultimate economic beneficiaries of land, but this register, focused as it is on overseas entities and not on land held by individuals or UK companies, would not be the appropriate vehicle The government amendments provide robust provisions to ensure that overseas entities provide information about beneficiaries, settlors and other persons who can appoint or remove trustees or have rights over the exercise of trustees’ functions, which some may refer to as protectors, where there is a trustee who is a registrable beneficial owner. These amendments go one step further and also apply where there are overseas arrangements with similar characteristics to a trust and those arrangements’ trustee equivalents are registrable beneficial owners The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, suggested that nominees will be used to hide true beneficial owners of property. I point out to the noble Lord that there are regulation-making powers within the Bill allowing for amendments to prevent such abuse, if that is needed. I therefore hope that, with the information that I have provided, the noble Lord and his supporters will feel able not to press Amendment 17 I turn to Amendments 1A, 22A and 29A, which seek to require a director who is acting as a nominee to provide a statement that they are satisfied by the legitimacy of the financial affairs of the beneficial owner and that the nominee will cease to act if information validating legitimacy is not forthcoming on a timely basis. I appreciate the intent of my noble friend Lord Agnew in tabling these amendments, and I understand that his intention is to further verify the legitimacy of the beneficial owner, to create an obligation for a nominee director to have regard to the financial affairs of those they are acting for, and to validate this legitimacy on a timely basis.