I found much to agree with in the comments from the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), as I did in those of the Minister. Today’s moves to prevent Russian banks and businesses from accessing our financial system and to ban key exports to Russia are much-needed and, frankly, long overdue. We should have been doing some of these things—not all of them—some time ago.
Yesterday, the Foreign Secretary said that this legislation would immediately be applied to Sberbank, VEB, Sovcombank and Otkritie. These measures will undoubtedly inflict damage on the Russian economy and punish the Russian state, but we must go further. It may be that I have not completely comprehended the Minister’s intentions, but why are we applying this immediate legislation only to those specific banks? The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) made a good point on this. Why not immediately apply it to VTB, Gazprombank or Alfa-Bank—Russia’s second, third and fourth biggest banks? I note that the Americans have sanctioned the same banks in the same way, and I assume that this is to protect the operation of fundamental European infrastructure such as oil and gas.
That was the point I was trying to draw from the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth when I asked whether he thought we were trying to ensure we did the maximum damage to Russia but the minimum damage to our allies if we had to maintain this for a long time. I am interested to hear the Minister’s answer, because by excluding those banks in the immediate term, we will to some extent undermine our strategy. Time is against us and troops are bearing down on Kyiv as we speak. The longer we wait, the longer Ukraine and her people will be subject to indiscriminate missile strikes and the terror of Putin’s forces.
Similarly, I would like to hear what the Government are doing to stop these measures being bypassed by Russia’s erstwhile friends, allies and fellow travellers: China, India and Brazil. Again, if we allow 30 days and those countries are willing to facilitate it, Russia could bypass a very large component of what we are trying to do. There might be rouble-support operations by China, for example. How would we cope with that? If we do not succeed in this strategy, frankly, we risk Ukraine being turned into a European Vietnam, a prospect too horrible to countenance.
As damaging as today’s measures are to the Russian financial system, they will not hit Putin where it hurts most. For that we need to target many more of his allies and facilitators who have bought their way into British society. That is what is missing from these statutory instruments.
We need to target those who own businesses on our stock exchange. We need to target those who own London homes that we can no longer afford because of Russian operations in London. We need to target oligarchs who own football clubs that many of our citizens can no longer afford to attend because they are so expensive. For too long, we turned a blind eye to dirty money flooding into the City of London. The right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), my successor as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, has a very strong record on this, and she will know that we have failed to use the tools we already have.
For example, we have had unexplained wealth orders at our disposal since 2017. In theory, they force a suspect to reveal the source of their wealth, and failure to do so results in the property under consideration being seized. Since 2017, only nine of those orders have been presented against four people, and only two of them succeeded.