It is a pleasure to speak to new clauses 1 and 2 in my name and those of many others, and it is a pleasure to follow so many excellent contributions to the debate. I hope it has become clear that there is a wide and deep cross-party consensus about the need to take this overdue Bill and repower it with not only good laws but proper resourcing so that we can begin to ensure that economic criminals in this country are put under rather more pressure.
A lot is in a name, and the Bill’s name is the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill. As the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) pointed out, what is crucial to ensuring the corporate transparency we need to police economic crime is information. Much of that information comes from whistleblowers and, crucially, from courageous journalists who are prepared to take tremendous risks and go to tremendous lengths to pursue the truth, publish the truth and hold the guilty to account.
The challenge we have is that we know we cannot police economic crime without such transparency, but that old advice to journalists to follow the money in pursuit of the truth is becoming almost impossible because our courts—English courts, London courts, which were sanctuaries for justice for 1,000 years—are becoming the strike point of choice for oligarchs around the world to intimidate, to cow and to deter journalists from publishing the truth with the threat of sky-high legal costs. My friend the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), who is not in his place, and I, together with the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), have been pushing this argument for almost a year. Yesterday, the hon. Member for Isle of Wight presented to the House a first-class private Member’s Bill, which I was proud to sign. I commend the Minister for the work that he did when he was Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee on ensuring that the cancer of strategic legal action against public participants is something that we know about and are collectively determined to act on.
Within the sub judice rules and exemptions that govern the debate, I can talk about some of the evidence that we now have on the record. There are now so many cases that it has become clear that there is a playbook for oligarchs. It is a playbook that all of them know and all of them follow. It is a playbook that is now predictable, and it is a playbook that we must draw to a close. We could draw it to a close this afternoon by agreeing to the amendments that we have tabled with cross-party support.
The first step in the playbook is to target the individual. Do not target the company, because companies are strong and individuals are weak. That is exactly why Arron Banks went for Carole Cadwalladr. He did not want to go for The Guardian or the Scott Trust; he wanted to go for an individual journalist. That is exactly why Prigozhin, as we now learn, decided to target Eliot Higgins and not Bellingcat, because of course an individual
is always more vulnerable than a corporate organisation. In most of these cases, we see an oligarch taking aim fair and square at an individual and not the corporate organisation behind them to maximise the power of intimidation.
Secondly, having identified the individual, the task is to maximise the intimidation. Let us look at what Tom Burgis had to go through when he was writing his book about the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation. The bad guys whom he was trying to expose actually went to the lengths of tapping his phone and bugging him. They must have done—that was the only way in which their investigators could turn up to a secret meeting that he was having with former Government officials in a car park. Those are the lengths that these people will go to.
Thirdly, there is the business of exaggerating the claims: taking some aside in a bit of written material and exaggerating it ridiculously to try to multiply legal costs. We saw that in particular with Mr Abramovich in his case against Catherine Belton and HarperCollins. It was a ridiculously exaggerated claim. Of course, the objective for Mr Abramovich was not to win his case. All he sought to do was maximise the legal costs for HarperCollins and Catherine Belton.
We see that now in a case in the Royal Courts of Justice, which I will not name but which I sat through a couple of weeks ago. That case is so thin. It entails an oligarch basically trying to claim that a number of emails that have been sent are in effect tantamount to a publication. Even though he is unable to name and specify the harm that has been done, he is seeking to bring a case for defamation. It is the flimsiest of cases anyone could imagine, yet hundreds of thousands of pounds have now been racked up in legal costs in an attempt to intimidate someone out of telling the truth.
Step four is to co-ordinate with others, which we saw in particular with Mr Abramovich, who decided to round up a number of his old mates to try to bring some kind of collective action—not just in this country, by the way, but in other countries such as Australia. That was a way to double the legal costs and maximise the pain against Catherine Belton and HarperCollins.
Then we have the attempts to rack up costs even though the grounds may be as flimsy as anything. Forensic News, for example, is being sued by Walter Soriano. Forensic News has a total of 12 subscribers in this country, yet Walter Soriano has been allowed to prosecute the case because of those 12 subscribers. Why could he possibly be doing that? Is it, as the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden described, because our legal costs are so high that the pain can be maximised by bringing a case here?
We see the same in the case referred to by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) of the former rulers of Kazakhstan, who have brought a SLAPPs case against the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and openDemocracy. That was because openDemocracy had the temerity to expose the $8 billion siphoned off through Jusan Technologies, which is somehow now claiming that its economic interests in the UK have been damaged and therefore it is entitled to bring a case in the Royal Courts of Justice. As a result, openDemocracy and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism are forking out thousands of pounds to defend themselves against this onslaught.
The situation we now have in this country is so appalling that, as we heard in the urgent question this afternoon, we have the spectacle of a Russian warlord being licensed by His Majesty’s Treasury to fly his lawyers to London to polish a case to sue an English journalist in an English court in order to undermine the sanctions this country has imposed on him. That is how ridiculous, corroded and broken our system has become. An exemption was licensed by a servant of the Crown to spend thousands of pounds flying lawyers to service the needs of the head of the Wagner Group in St Petersburg and to refine a lawfare case in an English court.