Yes, my right hon. Friend makes a good point. The reason why gifting and transferring to relatives, which is another category, is not in there is because I took—I almost ripped it out of the legislation—the
legislation that we put in place for Skripal, which also omitted those things. My right hon. Friend is quite right, though, and had my new clause been accepted today, I would have looked to make two changes when the Bill went to the Lords, the first of which would be to do that—to tighten it. The other would be to include a right of appeal if it went on too long the other way round, to balance the human rights issue.
We should bear in mind the fact that the National Crime Agency, for example, has people on police bail. I know of a case in which people have been on police bail for five years and we know nothing about it, so the restriction in my new clause on somebody who faces possible sanction is much less than the restriction the NCA imposes on some people. It is vital that we prevent ultra-wealthy individuals, with their teams of highly paid lawyers, advisers and accountants, from exiting the UK with their ill-gotten gains or hiding them where we cannot find them or get them.
By the way, I am a great believer in the presumption of innocence, but if somebody came out of the old Soviet Union—Russia—in the years between 1990 and 2010 with £1 billion, £2 billion, £3 billion or £4 billion to their name, and they were previously an officer of the Russian state, I do not quite start with the presumption of innocence that I would normally start with. I would start with a requirement on them to explain where that came from. That seems to me to be a reasonable, common-sense modification of my normal “mad-libertarian” interests.