Speeches by Bryant.

“It is better when we do take our European colleagues with us; it is just more effective. Similarly, we added 175 entities that are part of the illicit two rivers trading network yesterday. I could read your comments as welcoming the fact that we announced that yesterday, but I take the point about working at pace. I me…”

“We have taken a leadership role where we can, but the truth of the matter is that we have not always been able to take all of our European colleagues with us.”

“Well, it is better.”

“No, it is not into the UK.”

“If I can very briefly defend the previous Government, back in 2022—for all sorts of reasons that were discussed in the Foreign Affairs Committee—it was unclear to some members of the Government whether the UK was creating a new sanctions-developing policy of its own after Brexit or not. Sometimes we proceed alongside o…”

“Yes. I want to do it as soon as possible.”

“You mean in this Session? I do not know the answer to that. That is normally for the Chief Whip and the Leader of the House to decide.”

“Completely, because you will have to apply for a licence for any of those. Obviously, the precise legislation is still to be laid, but we intend to do so as soon as we can.”

“If you are knowingly evading sanctions, then you are breaking the law on sanctions and that is a criminal offence.”

“If you are knowingly expecting it to go to Russia, then you would be breaking the law. That is an offence.”

“At the moment, you would talk to us; when the legislation comes in, you will have to seek a licence and be able to prove where it is going to go and where it is going to stay. I can give another ECJU example: say you were producing protective vests and you were selling them to the police force in another country. You w…”

““Safe in the knowledge” is quite an interesting phrase to use there. If you are knowingly and/or, I think, recklessly—or should it be “knowingly and recklessly”?”

“First of all, as you just said, we have a good knowledge of the people who would be engaged in making such things, and the list that I was about to talk about starts with Armenia and includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Türkiye, Thailand, Serbia, India, the UAE, Vietnam, China and Malaysia. In each of those cou…”

“I will do it whenever you want.”

“Actually, would it be useful for me to say which are the jurisdictions where we recommend extra due diligence?”

“Yes.”

“If you look at some of the common high priority list—I have got it here; it is quite extensive, and I will obviously not go through all of it—it includes photosensitive semiconductor devices, transistors other than photosensitive ones, and diodes. It is a fairly specific list. Some of that is produced in the UK, and we…”

“No, because I am not sure where you are going with this.”

“Yes.”

“First, the world changes, and we note different versions of diversion or evasion of sanctions, so we want to make sure that we tackle that. That is particularly in relation to the Russian shadow fleet. It is not just that we wanted to tackle the fleet ships themselves, but one of the things we spotted more recently was…”