To ask the Right hon. Member for Kenilworth and Southam, representing the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission, pursuant to the Answer of 10 June 2025 to Question 56565 on Political Parties: Crypocurrencies, if he will publish the guidance on non-standard donations.
In terms of following the money, I am also very concerned by the push from the Treasury to make the UK an international, world-leading crypto hub. One thing we know about crypto is that it is designed not to be regulated. Although people will say that there is a log, so there is an audit trail for all the money, the regulators cannot see it and that is how it is designed. In my view, our regulators will therefore never be able to track the stuff through crypto, yet we seem to be saying that we want the UK to be a leading crypto finance centre. We should reconsider that.
The thing they all have in common is that they use a crypto-exchange platform called Binance, set up by a guy called Changpeng Zhao.
Reuters has investigated how those organisations used Binance to move money around totally anonymously between 2017 and 2021. Until 2021, this was regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, but still for this crypto -exchange, which moved bitcoins and lots of other currencies totally anonymously for those enterprises —for those funding terrorism and other nefarious enterprises —all people needed to do in order to register an account was to enter an email address. That was all people needed to do. There were no “know your customer” checks, no “know your client” checks and no ID requirements. People just had to enter an email address, which could easily be a fake one, and the money was moved around totally anonymously.
