By Ben Kerrigan-
Conservative Mp Bob Seely highlighted a number of legal firms and named solicitors whom he said were on the pay roll for defending sanctioned Russian Oligarchs.
Attacking the legal system on Monday, as he accused it of being ‘corrupted’, he used parliamentary privilege to identify individuals and firms who, he claimed, worked on behalf of Russian clients to silence rivals and critics.
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The Mp named Harbottle & Lewis, its solicitor John Kelly, Geraldine Proudler of CMS, Nigel Tait at Carter-Ruck and Hugh Tomlinson QC of Matrix Chambers, in an attack against lawyers preparing to defend Russian oligarchs subjected to sanctions by the UK government.
Seely, a former soldier who has been a vocal critic of such lawsuits went full swing against law firms looking to earn a lot of money defending targeted individuals in the UK believed to be facilitators or collaborators of president Putin’s brutal regime. He said: ‘You have got to wonder about the reputations these people are going to end up with in a few years time, even if they are behaving as well as maybe they might, and I am careful what I say. Maybe they are really lovely people but maybe… their amorality is going to bite their reputations in a way that will be uncomfortable.’
Seely alleges that City law firms ignore checks for clients they know are corrupt or involved in organized crime. Seely said a free press should be intimidating kleptocrats and criminals but suggested that those roles had been reversed. ‘We have a coalition not of the willing but of the woeful,’ he added. ‘Oligarchs, Putin’s henchmen… teaming up with amoral lawyers. These firms set up a one-stop corruption shop to offer a form of legalised intimidation to silence their rivals but also journalists and authors, but also an unstructured and unregulated private eye business which is now collecting kompromat on people in this country.
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‘Do not get me wrong – people have the right to advice and legal representation. But they are abusing it very badly in our society at the moment.’
Seely said he had been told by whistleblowers working for big firms that they do not do proper client checks and that ‘know your client’ systems were ‘non-existent’. He added: ‘Some actually have a list of people that they specifically do not do those checks on because they know that they are inherently corrupt and inherently criminal.’
He asked: ‘What on earth has happened to some of the major legal firms in this country that means that they specifically avoid “know your client” checks because they know that they will have to turn that client down if they do because those clients are corrupt, criminal or linked to organized crime? I am afraid to say that that is pretty shocking.’
He called on the government to ‘toughen up’ the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Seely was speaking after the government complained that lawyers had tried to block efforts to impose sanctions on Russia’s super-rich. Several City firms have said they are reviewing their client relationships after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Mp’s complaints centres around whether aggrieved Russians in the UK subjected to tough sanctions should have the right to seek legal recourse, and whether lawyers should comfortably be able to respond to the hiring of their clients without.
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