Speeches by Bryant.

“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…”

“I think we need to take concrete steps—obviously in accordance with international law, which is one of the things we have to bear in mind—to counter settlement expansion. The Minister for the Middle East and I are considering how we can best effect that. I do not know whether the Foreign Office wants to say anything mo…”

“Because we are keeping it under constant review.”

“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.”

“We would have to come back to Parliament because it would require legislation. I am not even sure whether it would be primary or secondary legislation.”

“I want to get to greater transparency, and get there as fast as possible. It is not directly within my Department, but it is one of the things that I want to drive forward.”

“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—”