Speeches by Maynard.

“Is it possible to get a list of what is still not sanctioned?”

“I have one small point—though, ultimately, it is not small. Yes, a ceasefire has been declared, but more than 600 people have been killed in Gaza since. This is far from a ceasefire, in practice.”

“Do we have to, on something like that?”

“Minister, given what you have just said, which I happen to completely agree with, about your view of the occupied territories and the illegality of those settlements, it does not sit well that we are not then acting on exactly what your sentiments are—and they are not just sentiments; they are facts—and putting that ba…”

“If goods are identified as mislabelled, what steps are being taken to verify the origin of the goods?”

“The Committee has looked into this, and we are very worried about the loopholes for products being produced in the occupied territories and coming on to British shores. We can focus on the goods, but we also really want to focus on the services, because that is every bit as big—if not a lot bigger. With the Chair’s per…”

“Okay, so all the more reason to be sanctioning it. We should be setting an example to our European allies to say, “We are sanctioning it. Get on with it.””

“Yes. First of all, it is a weird euphemistic term, which I did not understand. Somebody described it to me today as “shakedowns”; I am not over the shoulder on that one, but essentially somebody says, “I’ve made a technical error,” and you say, “Yes, you have, and we’ll have some money for that, please.” They hand over…”

“I am resisting pulling up a four-year oil price chart right now, but we could do that. The oil price has moved around a lot in that period. I find it very weird that we are choosing to continue to not sanction a massive pipeline coming out of Russia with oil in it on account of markets. I do not think that that is what…”

“I want to go there, because I am worried that we have a massive gap in enforcement and bad actors probably know that. If we are serious about sanctions enforcement, we need to close that gap really fast. I do not know what the answers are, and I am not expecting you to have them all, but let’s get the facts open so tha…”

“Whichever way, we have a really big problem.”

“Because if it is anything like that, obviously we have a really big problem. There are an awful lot more bad actors than that. That means HMG has not been doing what it should have been.”

“Going back to the pipeline in the package, as per your announcement yesterday, targeting one of the world’s largest oil pipeline companies, PJSC Transneft, which is responsible for transporting over 80% of Russian oil exports—this is the ninth package. Why was that not in the first package? I do not understand. That is…”

“I want to park compound settlements. Anecdotally, I have been told—I do not know whether this is true—that there have been two arrests in the last 15 years. Obviously, that was under a different Administration, but would you mind checking and telling us how many individuals have been arrested on that basis?”

“My question is to the Minister and Joanne: HMRC is, as I understand it, responsible for criminal sanctions enforcement, and one of the legal bases for that is section 68 of the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979, or CEMA. Subsection (2) covers the “intent to evade”. That is the more serious offence where a person i…”

“I am going to ask, “How long is a piece of string?” because there is a war on and there is quite a lot of information in that. You might not be able to validate everything perfectly, but there might be enough circumstantial evidence to say, “Well, this is a bad enough actor that we want to be stopping this.” Do you hav…”

“I take your point about journalists being useful. You have probably seen “Bypassing the Blockade: How Hong Kong Feeds European Technology Into Russia’s War in Ukraine” by the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation. Very helpfully, there is a list of UK exports going through to Russia. Even more helpfully, there …”

“Just looking a little bit further than maritime services, we have a big services economy in finance and insurance. How confident are you in shutting down the relationships on finance between Russia and UK, which have been very substantial? How much is that being shut down?”

“That is the Europeans, but what about the Americans? Does that mean we would not do it without the Europeans, but we are okay to do it without the Americans?”

“We talked about this in the Chamber a couple of weeks ago. India is importing oil and gas from Russia, and it has a number of refineries—I think four out of five are state-owned, with the fifth being Reliance. It is processing its oil and gas into petrochemical products and exporting them, including to the UK. Essentia…”