: My Lords,
Kazakhstan’s President said he expected Russian-led forces to
leave in the next 10 days. Bearing in mind what the noble Lord
just said, what is the department’s assessment of that statement?
Last night, I asked the noble Lord about the public register of
beneficial owners of overseas entities that buy and sell property
in the UK. A recent Chatham House report showed that the Kazakh
elite own over half a billion pounds in luxury property in the
UK. When will we act on corruption in this country?
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development
Office (): My Lords, on
the noble Lord’s first question, of course it was through the
CSTO, of which Kazakhstan is an integral part, together with
Russia, Belarus, Tajikistan, Kurdistan and Armenia, that the
President invited those troops in. We have been reassured,
through our engagement with the ambassador, that there is a
scaling down and that a return will begin very shortly. On the
noble Lord’s point about those who use London as a safe haven, I
assure him that we continue to be very vigilant to this. As he
may be aware, we have cracked down on illicit finance through,
for example, the Criminal Finances Act 2017 and we have already
published our ambitious economic crime plan for 2019-22. We will
be going further in tackling dirty money. The National Crime
Agency for example, has increased the number of
its investigations into corrupt elites, as he termed them, and
the Government are reviewing all tier 1 investor visas granted
before 5 April 2015.
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