I think it is understood that those two individuals at some point had assets in the UK. Hence my frustration that the long delay and the public inquiry meant that they had every opportunity to remove those assets. We cannot guarantee that they used them, but they certainly had the opportunity. I fear that, with the way that various shell companies work, it is not as simple as looking at one individual’s creditworthiness: there are many other ways. I assume that these two people, within their own context, are
considered to be very successful individuals who are not short of the ready, and therefore have the opportunity through various mechanisms to exploit financial services. If the order is to mean anything, there must be some enforcement capability to it, and I am inquiring whether there is.
I noticed that the debate that we had in 2018 was in February, towards the end of the month. To reinforce the point of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, that this is not really a deterrent of any sort, the attack on the Skripals happened on 4 March that year, days later. That says everything about the weakness of the deterrent effect. It would be incumbent on the Treasury to rewrite its note in the light of the Salisbury poisonings. We need to pay great respect in understanding the suffering not only of the Skripals but of Dawn Sturgess, who died as a consequence.
I also wondered—I ought to know the answer to this but do not, so I am simply inquiring—whether the same orders now apply to the two individuals identified as being involved in the Skripal poisonings, Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga and Dr Alexander Mishkin, both of the GRU. If this is a principle, it ought at least to be more broadly applied. I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, that we need to implement the legislation passed in both Houses.
A more robust response to the poisoning of Litvinenko and the attempted poisoning of Skripal is fundamentally necessary. Will we wait for a third or fourth poisoning before we start looking at more senior figures within the Russian establishment? Clearly, all the people we have mentioned who face freezing orders were under orders from far more senior people. It is a great weakness in our position not to have recognised that much more clearly and to have considered whether, if we believe that constraining people from using UK financial services has an impact on their behaviour, making that work up the chain will be a lot more useful than simply applying it to the individuals who we have been able to identify but who are, frankly, in every case, pretty small fry.
4.30 pm