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Russia

I will be brief. My hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) will no doubt have more to say than I will. I want to take up a point that arose earlier, but I shall be careful about how I phrase it, because it concerns a constituent who came to see me some months ago; I shall not name him or his company. He is part of the arrangement to do with the residue of Yukos in the west. He came to see me, as constituents do, to explain to me some of the repercussions of what has happened, and the Russian Government’s pursuit of anyone and anything that has a relationship with the former Yukos company. We all know that the Yukos affair has dragged on a long time. Obviously, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are currently in Russian prisons, and likely to be there a long time. However, it is probably less well known that other individuals—the majority of whom are not, I think, Russian—have been subject to a vigorous campaign from the Kremlin, which shows no sign of abating. That means that my constituent is no longer able to carry on his business to the extent that he used to. He has even to be wary about where he goes on holiday, because of the repercussions of action taken against him through the Russian Government in a third country or even this country. That is deeply worrying.