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…”

“Well, it is better.”

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

“First of all, let’s acknowledge that it was the fourth anniversary yesterday, and we introduced a new set of sanctions yesterday, which we will perhaps come on to. It is true that the Russian bear is a wily fox—to mix my metaphors—in the sense that the Russians have sought to avoid and evade all our sanctions every ste…”

“Yes, they are two different things.”

“In terms of a percentage?”

““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”?”

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

“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…”

“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…”

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

“I do not know the answer to that question. Does anybody?”

“It is always an offence to lie to HMRC.”

“I completely agree. It is one of the things that I have been committed to for a very long time. When I was a Minister in the Foreign Office, I suspended the Turks and Caicos Government because of allegations of corruption there. Oddly enough, I appointed Rob Rinder as the lawyer to deal with it. We, as a Government, ar…”

“We do not have a ban on the import of goods from settlement areas. I know there is an argument for us to have such a ban, and it is one of the things we obviously keep under constant review.”

“I apologise—I signed it off, but it has not got to you yet.”

“It might be helpful if we wrote to you to tell you how much that happens.”

“I am afraid that you are not going to get any more out of me, Chair. It is not entirely my area of responsibility. We took a position in DBT that we were going to suspend some of the licences. The Foreign Office had made an adjudication that there was a real risk of Israel not abiding by international humanitarian law,…”

“Not in the coherent way that I think you are asking me to stand up an argument around. Of course, we have heard people make an argument for that to us, and we are not deaf.”

“We could talk about the broader policy on Israel and Gaza at some length, though that is not my particular area of responsibility. Having looked a bit at what Ireland and Spain are trying to do—I think they are really the frontrunners in this—I would say that they are struggling to create legislation that they think wi…”