Speeches by Maynard.

“Great—even better. What are your hopes after that? You have the rest of this Parliament. What are the Labour Government hoping to achieve in Europe if we get those put away? What are your goals after that?”

“Just taking those three and adding in the youth experience, youth mobility and ETS, if the teams—DBT and others—get those over the line in the next six, 12 or 18 months, which I guess is probably your goal—”

“The third one was IEM—the internal energy market—or electricity market.”

“Do you have a number?”

“Sticking with SAFE for a moment, Canada is rumoured to have got into SAFE for a grand total of €10 million. We had an offer price of €6 billion. What is going on there, and what is our way through on that?”

“Can you give us an overview of where we are now with regards to negotiations on SAFE, SPS and the internal energy market?”

“So is it sort of entirely unknown? Is there any public information available on how they calculate what?”

“Can I ask a practical question? With the contribution and cohesion fund payments, is there a clear table that says, “Okay, if it’s going to be this, look down here and here it is”, or is it completely a black box: “The EU says you have to pay this”?”

“The appellate body is essentially defunct—stop me if that is too harsh a term—so there are quite a lot of mutterings about the Cameroon meetings. Could you scope out what the UK is thinking in terms of how you would like the WTO to look if there were changes? What reforms do you think are necessary to make it a functio…”

“If we got business travel, mutual recognition and sectors done, is that the apex—the best we can hope for? Or are there other things beyond that which make sense and will help trade between us and the EU?”

“Why?”

“Are we able to have broad categories to say, “We are still not sanctioning metals or fertiliser”?”

“Metals? Fertilisers?”

“We are still taking fertiliser from Russia because we need its fertiliser.”

“I would be more confident if we did not have a pipeline with 80% of Russia’s oil exports coming out of it that two days ago was still not on that list—that is a big, chunky thing. Is that by far the biggest asset, or are there other assets of that size that have still not been sanctioned by the UK?”

“Fair enough, but what about publishing a set of principles for why you are not sanctioning things? Clearly, you have known about things like this pipeline for a long time, so that is not an oversight. You have made the decision not to sanction it—perhaps that was right—but there a whole load of other things that you ar…”

“Why not lead?”

“If I may, I do not think Cayman was on that list. Cayman is one of the big three, along with the BVI and Bermuda. To give a flavour, you might have seen The Guardian today. This matters; we have $8 billion going through British island territories in, essentially, dodgy Russian stuff. We have $4.4 billion going through …”

“Moving to beneficial ownership, at the moment we have an improved situation in the UK, but it is pretty sub-satisfactory. I particularly want to ask you about property owned by a UK company that is controlled by a trust, or property owned directly by a trust, with a view to that information on beneficial ownership bein…”

“The Clerks can correct me if I wrong, but as per the information that we received, if a property is owned directly by a trust, there is no searchable register of trust beneficiaries recorded through the TRS. Where available, it can be requested by interested parties, subject to a legitimate interest test, and we really…”