No, I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman. I remind him what happened on 1 May 2018 when we debated the remaining stages of the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018. We voted on whether to introduce—guess what?—an economic crime Bill to bring forward a public register of the ownership of properties. Conservative Members all voted against that and the Opposition voted in favour, so I will not take any lectures from him on that.
I care passionately about the issue because we are facing an absolutely critical moment. None of us elected as MPs in this generation thought that we would see the elected Mayor of a town gunned down by Russian mercenaries when giving out aid in a democratic society, as Yuri Prylypko, Mayor of Hostomel, was today; none of us thought that we would see the Russian Government bombing refugees when there was meant to be a ceasefire; and none of us thought that we would see ceasefires repeatedly ignored day after day, so timeliness is all today. This is not really emergency legislation—it is just long overdue—but it is timely and important. In fact, I suggest that the amendments that the Government have tabled are more important than the material in the original Bill.
What depresses me is how many Putin-related Russian oligarchs and people with large assets in the UK have still yet to condemn the invasion of Ukraine. It is an absolutely deafening silence. It shames all of us that we have sanctioned only 11 oligarchs so far, or perhaps 17 individuals—there are different ways of counting it; it depends who we count as an oligarch—whereas the United States of America and the European Union have done far more.
In the Foreign Affairs Committee this afternoon, the Foreign Secretary tried to blame me for not having done enough. It was all my fault because apparently I had said something that she had to subsequently retract because it turned out that that was not true and I had not said it at all. She has apologised. The point is that everything that we are doing today should have been done in 2018, so we are genuinely frustrated.
We are seeking transparency about who owns what. The Bill does a substantial amount of that, of course, but we also want that to be enforced. There is a major problem that Companies House cannot even question whether the information that it has been provided with is accurate. If someone looks up a director on the Companies House website, it says that it cannot verify whether the information is correct. We want to go that step further and it seems bizarre not to include that in the Bill, which is why there are amendments about that.
We want individuals to be sanctioned. The measure that the Minister has introduced has gone some considerable way to making that easier, but I still do not understand why we made it so difficult in the first place. We also want the seizure of assets. There is not much point in sanctioning people if it will not have any effect. That is also extremely timely and must happen rapidly because of all the things that we have said about asset flight.
My anxiety is that without new clause 29 we are not doing that last part at all. My guess is that if we have to wait for the Government to introduce further legislation, that will not happen until after the Queen’s Speech sometime in May, so it will not go through both Houses for another six months. If we leave things that long, we will do exactly what we did in 2014 over Crimea: the moment will have passed and we will forget. Our memories will be short, another issue will come along and Putin will have won.
That is why I have tabled four simple amendments. Amendments 24 and 25 say that when someone registers or updates the register of beneficial ownership, they simply have to say whether any of the individuals that they are referring to are sanctioned individuals. That is important because it means that the people who are
doing the registering have to check whether they are sanctioned individuals. We might think that they would want to do that anyway, but forcing them to do it means that, when they then register incorrectly, they are committing the offence, rather than the sanctioned individual. That is why that is important.
8.45 pm
On amendment 26, of course it is absolutely delightful that the Minister is saying that the Government are going to do all this in the Lords. I have never understood why Ministers do this. Why do Ministers always say, “It’s absolutely fascinating. It’s an absolutely brilliant amendment—I wish I’d thought of it myself—but we’re not going to let it go through today because this is just the elected House. No, we’ve got to go and take it down the corridor to somewhere else, where there are much more intelligent members, who can obviously decide on a much better and more informed basis, and where the Minister can get the credit for having tabled the amendment in the first place”?
All amendment 26 does is remove three words—“knowingly or recklessly”. In the Government’s version, it is an offence knowingly or recklessly to provide false information. Why on earth would we set such a high bar? It is almost impossible, I would have thought, to take that to court and to win. My amendment just takes those three words out. The Minister says he is going to take it to the Lords and he is going to redraft it. What is he going to redraft after taking those three words out? He could just agree it today, and I would wander over and kiss him on the forehead and congratulate him—[Interruption.] Oh no, maybe not. Sorry. It would not be in order and it would not be appropriate. I am merely trying to say this: the Minister knows that I am fond of him and I think he is a good man, and I just want him to do the right thing tonight. So if he could just stand up later—we need not tell anybody else: we do not have to tell Downing Street, the Whips Office or anybody else—and say, “We’re going to accept it tonight”, that would be great.
Amendment 27 is important because, as I said earlier, it is daft to have a rule that it is an offence to provide false information if nobody can check whether it is false information. All my amendment 27 does is say that the registrar—Companies House—is able to ask other people, including the people who provided the information, whether it is true information. For that matter, it could go to other Departments of Government and ask whether it is, including the security services. I do not think that that is too much to ask. I am guessing that the Government will end up doing something very similar at some point and, if they do not, frankly, the whole of the rest of the Bill is a waste of space.
With that, I am grateful for the Committee’s attention, but really we need to do all these things in a timely fashion and some of us are just phenomenally frustrated that it has taken us so long to get here.