Speeches by Bryant.

“And it would require legislative change, just to be clear. That is my anxiety about the pace that we might be able to move at on that.”

“I am not Treasury. HMRC would have to make a determination about whether they could go in that direction. And there is another problem for them, which is that many of these issues are subject to quite tight confidentiality issues—not because we have insisted on it, but because of the whole premise on which the reportin…”

“If I answer the first bit, Jo will answer the second bit. There is a perfectly legitimate question around whether we should not be publishing more details not just about the nature of what has happened, but so we are naming and shaming people. There will undoubtedly be an advantage to doing so because of the deterrent …”

“You have saved me many times, Mr Byrne. Compound settlements are part of the way HMRC do a lot of their business. For instance, if there was an investigation into your income tax, they might come to a compound settlement as well. There are legitimate questions to answer, but—”

“I know. First of all, I want to say that I think the vast majority of our sanctions are holding and UK business and UK financial institutions and everybody are abiding by them. I think that is an example of success. I am not complacent about that. I want to do everything I possibly can to make sure that Putin does not …”

“I am happy to do that.”

“It is a perfectly legitimate point, and I am very happy to write to you about it.”

“Or you could argue that it means the legal threshold is inappropriate and needs to be changed, or whatever—”

“We will write back to you.”

“Just to be clear, you will know that in many instances what HMRC moves towards is a compound settlement, but it would not do that in relation to the issues you are talking about, because that would be a case of deliberate evasion, and then it would not use compound settlements.”

“Yes—well, not state secrets, but stuff that might enable those who want to evade sanctions to do so.”

“We will give you whatever we can. My only sensitivity is that we do not want to expose any—”

“That question is a bit more for you, Anna, operationally.”

“It is broadly speaking at the right size. Obviously, it is going to be taking on some additional responsibilities in the near future, and we will need to review to make sure that we have the right number of people for it.”

“That is why I was somewhat hesitant in the way I said it, because to be honest, it is only anecdotal. I have not seen any categorical definition of different countries’ activities. We try to work closely. Of course, the majority of our historic sanctions regime was operated through the European Union, though we still h…”

“When we came into office in 2024, one of the things that we said that we would do was review the whole sanctions regime. Some of the decisions that were made yesterday were made on the back of that, and some of the announcements that we are going to be making in the next few weeks, and some of the legislation that we w…”

“Yes—I have the numbers somewhere. We have had 185 potential breaches reported of which five, as I said, are at a late stage, 117 were closed and 57 were reported to HMRC. Does HMRC want to take up the baton?”

“First of all, OTSI has only had 18 months, and it is obviously not able to investigate things that happened before its powers came into operation. I would expect the number of instances to go up over future years, rather than down. About five cases are quite close to conclusion and could lead to substantial measures be…”

“Of course there may be malefactors, and we obviously seek to chase them down, either through HMRC’s activities or through our own. But in the vast majority of cases, industry works closely with the Department to get to a good set of outcomes. In truth, it is a complex mix, because we have financial sanctions, trade san…”

“I will let others come in in one sec, but in relation to Hong Kong, I think I am right in saying that only a couple of months ago, a director of a UK firm was sent to prison for exports of controlled goods to Hong Kong without a licence.”