HC Deb 23 January 1985 vol 71 cc1104-12

Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn. —[Mr. Peter Lloyd.]

12.12 am
Sir Geoffrey Johnson Smith (Wealden)

I hope that my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs will shortly appear. The House never ceases to surprise me with its moods and the swiftness with which it sometimes disposes of its business. In the meantime, I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House for returning to the Front Bench.

The complex subject of this debate originates as long ago as 1957 when the then Government made their ill-fated attack on Egypt. The immediate effect on British residents in Egypt was summary expulsion and confiscation of all their property and assets. Many of those people, including the Forsyth family, the head of which lives in my constituency and on whose behalf I speak, had settled in Egypt, working for British companies and responsible for sales and other matters in an important market for British goods and services. The Forsyths acted for such top companies as British Leyland, Rolls-Royce, Daimler and BSA.

I see that my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State is now present. He and I share many interests, not just in matters of political philosophy. We are both Sussex Members and my hon. Friend's constituency now includes East Grinstead which I represented for many years. He comes new to his appointment and this is the first time that I have been in a position to welcome him to the responsible position that he now holds in the Foreign Office.

In saying that, I ask my hon. Friend to remember that I do not take up causes lightly. One does not often take up an Adjournment debate of this kind or question the veracity, strength or skill of important services of the Crown or those whom it employs. Tonight I am questioning not the veracity of the Foreign Office but its determination, and the manner in which it has conducted its business through its agents. My hon. Friend the Minister comes new to his responsibilities. I ask him to bear those comments in mind.

Sudden deportation and confiscation of property had a catastrophic effect on the livelihood of the Britishers. A system of compensation was set up in acknowledgment of that fact. Happy relations now exist between this country and Egypt, a country which, both before and after the Nasser regime, has always been considered to be a good friend of ours. Good relations were restored with the 1959 agreement, signed by to two Governments, which was meant to restore law and order, and fairness, with regard to compensation, for those British nationals who had been affected as a consequence of the Suez affair.

The trouble stems from the 1959 agreement, however, and more particularly from the interpretation and implementation of its terms. The Forsyth family appreciate the fact that rights are not conveyed to individual citizens by agreements between states. However, the Government entered into the treaty to safeguard the property interests of the British citizens upon whom Egyptian wrath and revenge had understandably fallen in reprisal for the use of military force against Egypt by the then British Government.

The Government have obligations and a strong moral duty towards the British subjects involved. Regrettably, I do not think that the Government have fulfilled their responsibilities adequately. Too often, in reassuring correspondence with me, the Department has shown the face of Dr. Jekyll. Those more personally affected have seen the face of Mr. Hyde.

The first move of the Foreign Office was to introduce a private company to conduct the necessary procedures in Egypt. The company was called Toplis and Harding. It sounds like a television serial. The Government were well aware that that company, destined to handle the property of absent owners at a total value running into tens of millions of pounds, was newly formed and had a capital of only £500. Throughout the resulting chaos the Government remained detached, although deeming it necessary to provide public funds to sustain the company in circumstances that one can only call deplorable.

The financial support continued despite the fact that the company itself was sequestrated by the Egyptian authorities because of financial irregularities in the conduct of its affairs. I do not want to seek parliamentary privilege, but I could go further and describe those financial irregularities in more graphic terms. As losses mounted to the clients of the creature created by the Foreign Office, there was no Government intervention. Indeed, dismayed Britishers were advised to seek redress, by their own means, through the Egyptian courts.

The principal bone of contention is the former home near Cairo of the Forsyth family, a property having a substantial value in Egypt. I see that my hon. Friend's advisers have just taken up their positions. I choose my words advisedly. The company was a creature set up by the Foreign Office as an agent designed to do what the British Government had agreed to do as a result of the agreement with the Egyptian Government, and the Foreign Office walked away from its responsibilities. The company was subject to a degree of financial irregularity that the Foreign Office should have spotted much sooner.

After the official Egyptian confiscation of the Forsyth property it was taken over by Egyptian military forces—here we see how life is lived in other countries—and later provided as a residence for an Egyptian High Court judge. The influence of that judge was great, because his brother was Vice President of Egypt, and head of the Egyptian armed forces, General Hakim Amer. The judge died in 1972 and General Amer died in circumstances similar to those in which Field Marshal Rommel died. The family of the judge remain in occupation of the Forsyth property until now but ceased to pay any rent as from 1966. Instead, they laid claim to outright possession of the property using forged documents. They put forward a further claim to ownership on the grounds of so-called "prescriptive rights."

These events have been the subject of litigation in Cairo for the past 10 years. I do not want to make a mockery of the debate—Forsyth is Forsyth, but there is a "Forsyth Saga." That is the scale of my correspondence, let alone that of my constituent, Mr. Forsyth, who has carried on at great expense to himself and with much pain and agony to his family. Some 50 court hearings have been postponed or adjourned in that time. The delays have caused repeated representations by Ministers to their Egyptian counterparts. The astonishing fact is that representations have been made three times at the level of Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs—by my noble Friend Lord Carrington, by my right hon. Friend the Member for Cambridgeshire, South-East (Mr. Pym), and by the present Foreign Secretary. On other occasions, representations have been made by my right hon. Friend, our distinguished Leader of the House, but the Egyptians have failed so far to respond in a fitting or satisfactory way.

What has gone wrong? It seems that there has been a conspicuous failure on the part of the Government to adhere to the terms and conditions of the 1959 agreement in a straightforward manner and to ensure that Egypt, as co-signatory, does likewise. Egyptians have sought to exploit and to benefit by holding on to property to which they are not entitled. They even held on to money that was unjustifiably been extracted by the Egyptian fiscal administration from the family's private bank account to the tune of £35,000. That is the behaviour of ordinary individuals in Egypt.

The Forsyth family took advice from solicitors and it was argued, inter alia, that the Government were entitled, under the terms of the 1959 agreement, to insist on the property being restored to the Forsyth family with vacant possession. The Government, by their failure to insist on their rights under the agreement, have deprived the Forsyth family of the right to live in their own home. Instead of facing up to this argument, the Foreign Office has sought to hide behind a form of renunciation which had been signed by my constituent's father, who is now deceased, when a compensation payment had been negotiated through the Foreign Compensation Commission.

I should like to go into some detail as it is important. It is a legal matter. I refer to the claim by the Forsyth family that, when the late Mr. Forsyth was invited to sign the form of renunciation, it was not represented to him by his solicitor that, in signing the form, it was the intention that he would thereby exonerate the Government from discharging their obligations to recover vacant possession of the villa, according to the terms of the agreement. On 2 October 1965, the late Mr. Forsyth signed a form of renunciation stating, inter alia: I hereby renounce and surrender all claims by me arising out of the measures of Egyptianisation and sequestration so far as they have affected my interests in the property set out in Schedule A to the renunciation. Schedule A defines the late Mr. Forsyth's interest as capital depreciation of a villa at"— it then gives the address. His son's submission is that that letter of renunciation did not effectively deprive him, or his late father, of the right to require the Government to enforce the 1959 agreement made between the Government of the United Arab Republic and the Government of the United Kingdom in so far as that agreement provided for the return of all sequestrated British-owned property to its owners.

In other words, in so far as the compensation included the payment of capital depreciation, it was understood to mean compensation for irrecoverable loss of value resulting from the sequestration measures. There is a loss of value to the property because it is occupied by a tenant. As far as the late Mr. Forsyth could see, that could have gone on for years. How was he to know?

The Foreign Office should recognise that there was no provision in the 1959 agreement for the payment of monetary compensation where the loss could be made good by the return of the property or, in lieu, of vacant possession. Even if it could be said that the form of renunciation effectively extinguished such a right in favour of the Forsyth family, the late Mr. Forsyth was not advised of that before he signed the renunciation form, nor did he intend that he would thereby prejudice his right. Why should that be?

Perhaps the advice that the late Mr. Forsyth was given was faulty. He was represented by solicitors, who had on their staff a person who, before he joined them, had been a member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the FCO'S legal adviser in Egypt. It is suggested that that person created the concept of compensation, without any legal foundation, but as a formula agreed with the Foreign Compensation Commission. A man cannot go from being a legal adviser in the Foreign Office to advising an independent citizen, because he is bound to be in favour of the interpretation of the Foreign Office. I do not make a charge of dishonesty, but my constituent should be independent of the Foreign Office, as should have been Toplis and Harding.

It is not totally incomprehensible why my constituent has fought his case for many years. I sympathise with his view that the Foreign Office should not appear to hide behind a form of renunciation of claims in such circumstances. It is no good saying that it is a matter for the Egyptian courts. We are concerned about an agreement between the British and Egyptian Government which was signed in 1959. The Foreign Office should insist that the Egyptian Government fulfil their obligations by arranging for the property to be handed over to Mr. Forsyth immediately.

The action was not justiciable in the English court. My constituent cannot take the Foreign Office to court. There are no means of judging which legal interpretation is correct, whether that of the Foreign Office or of my constituent. The Minister will be advised by his legal advisers, whom I have heard say to his predecessors that they are right. However, others disagree profoundly with the interpretation of the Foreign Office.

How can my constituent get justice? The matter has been allowed to continue for too long. If a public inquiry could be held I would ask it to look into Toplis and Harding, which handled my constituent's case and which was in reality a creature of the Foreign Office, and to examine how well the Foreign Office behaved. Was it too distant? Toplis and Harding's record was appalling, and the FCO should not have tolerated its inefficiencies and practices. As I mentioned, subsequently it was accused of dishonest practices.

An inquiry would reveal how difficult it is for citizens to obtain redress in such matters. The Parliamentary Commissioner cannot deal with it. So prolonged were the activities of Toplis and Harding that by the time my constituent could sue, he had run out of time. He is right, therefore, to feel frustrated.

The Government are dealing with a country with which we are now on friendly terms. It is a recipient of British financial help in many areas, including trade, culture and defence. Why cannot the same care and understanding of Egypt's special needs be extended to my constituent, whose family was a victim of hostilities initiated by his own country? I beg my hon. Friend to assure me that the Government will make full representations along the lines I have suggested.

12.29 am
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr. Tim Renton)

I understand the deep concern of my hon. Friend and neighbour in Sussex the Member for Wealden (Sir G. Johnson-Smith) for the cares of his constituent. After all, I inherited many of them from him at the last election in East Grinstead. They still speak with great affection of the way in which he looked after them. Therefore, I fully understand that it is because of his strong passion for the worries of Mr. Douglas Forsyth that he has raised this matter on an Adjournment debate. He spoke passionately about the problems which his constituent, Mr. Douglas Forsyth, and his late father have faced in securing redress and compensation for property losses in Egypt, and I have much sympathy with what he said. But I must tell him, as he knows well, that there has been voluminous correspondence on this subject over the years. My hon. Friend's constituent has been assiduous in keeping his problems and concerns before us, and my hon. Friend has been equally assiduous.

We have much sympathy for Mr. Forsyth, and we acknowledge that he has encountered great difficulty in securing repossession of the villa which he owns in Heliopolis outside Cairo. But I hope to demonstrate that there is much common ground between the Government and my hon. Friend on this matter.

The Forsyth family were not alone in the losses which they suffered in 1956. Most of the British community in Egypt suffered similar misfortune following the conflict of that year. Many British people were expelled from Egypt and had their property sequestrated. It was against that background that the Government reached an agreement with the Egyptian authorities in 1959, which provided for the payment of compensation and the return of British property to its former owners.

The villa owned by Mr. Douglas Forsyth's father was, as my hon. Friend said, sequestrated in 1956. It was then let by the Egyptian Sequestrator General on 1 May 1957 at a low rate on an agreement which provided for 15 days' notice of termination on either side. The villa was desequestrated by the Egyptian authorities on 1 March 1960, under the terms of the 1959 agreement, but the Sequestrator General did not give the tenant notice to quit at that time. As a result, the tenant remains in occupation to this day. As my hon. Friend is aware, tenants have considerable legal protection in Egypt, and it is extremely difficult to secure their eviction.

As to the effects of the form of renunciation, I assure my hon. Friend that we do not rely on that form in deciding what representations to make. We have made many representations irrespective of the effect of the form of renunciation that was signed by Mr. Forsyth's father.

I must place it on record that the Forsyth family has not been ungenerously treated in the matter of compensation. Mr. Forsyth submitted several claims to the Foreign Compensation Commission under the provisions of the Orders in Council relating to the distribution of the compensation that had been received from the Egyptian Government. A total of £79,914 was awarded to him as a result and accepted by him in full settlement of his claims. We do not defend Toplis and Harding. We reached a settlement with Mr. Forsyth in part because of the failure of Toplis and Harding to act properly.

Included in the total was a payment of more than £3,000 in settlement of a claim for loss in value of his villa resulting from the fact that it had been returned to him with a sitting tenant. The total of nearly £80,000 compensation was a considerable sum 20 years ago. and I should mention that Mr. Forsyth's late father also received a grant of ?30,000 from the Egyptian Grants Committee for the comparative hardship he suffered as a refugee from Egypt.

The correspondence that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has received from my hon. Friend's constituent shows that there has been some misunderstanding of the position of the Foreign Compensation Commission. I take this opportunity to clarify this. The FCC was established under the Foreign Compensation Act 1950 with two principal functions. The first is the administrative function of registering claims. The second is the judicial and administrative functions involved in awarding and distributing payments of lump sum compensation received by Her Majesty's Government from other Governments.

In exercising the latter function, the Commission has the task of inviting claims to participate in such compensation, judicially determining these claims, deciding which are admissible and which are to be rejected, and finally distributing the moneys among the successful claimants. Although the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs retains some responsibility for its work and funding, the commission is wholly independent of the Government when it acts in its judicial capacity in determining claims.

The members of the commission and its staff have always tackled the difficult tasks assigned to them with dedication and conscientiousness. In connection with these Egyptian affairs, they received no fewer than 9,000 claims, made 15,000 adjudications and determinations and distributed to claimants sums in excess of £31 million. This was no small achievement and it must be said that most claimants were very grateful for their work.

My hon. Friend touched on the interpretation of the 1959 agreement. My hon. Friend's constituent and his lawyers contend that the Egyptian Government are in breach of the 1959 agreement because the sitting tenant was not removed before the family's villa was returned to them. As my hon. Friend is aware, I have received different advice on this particular point. The two view points have been set out fully in the correspondence that has taken place. It has not proved possible to harmonise these views, and I do not think it would serve any useful purpose on this occasion to re-state the different positions. Nevertheless, I emphasise that this difference of view has not lessened in the slightest degree the pressure that we have exerted on the Egyptian Government on behalf of Mr. Forsyth.

My hon. Friend has understandably referred to the expense and frustration that his constituent has suffered, both as a result of not having possession of his villa, and as a result of the court action in Egypt. I sympathise with much of what my hon. Friend said. In the court case for full possession of the villa, his constituent has been engaged in a legal action that has lasted over 10 years. We are all familiar with the law's delays, but this delay is undoubtedly too long.

My hon. Friend referred to the Forsyth saga, but in reading this file I was reminded more of Charles Dickens' "Bleak House" and the problems in the last century of getting cases through Chancery.

We have told the Egyptian authorities of our feelings on this point and have asked them to do what they can to encourage those responsible for the administration of their courts to speed matters up.

There is, however, a strict limit to what any Egyptian Government can do to help us or our citizens in the case of an action that is before the courts. The courts in Egypt are as proud and jealous of their independence from the executive arm of Government as our own courts are.

Sir Geoffrey Johnson Smith

My submission is that we should not leave this matter to the courts. Is this not a matter that, under the agreement of 1959, should be dealt with on a Government-to-Government basis?

Mr. Renton

That brings us back to the interpretation of that agreement, on which there is a difference of opinion. It is not appropriate to go into that further now.

I leave it to my hon. Friend to imagine what the reaction of a court in this country would be were we as a Government to seek to interfere in anycase before them that involved a foreign national. I suggest that the reaction of the court would be robust, and rightly so.

It is also important to remember that the court case initiated by my hon. Friend's constituent is not without its complications. His constituent's father did not himself take any court action in this connection. It was only five years after his father's death in 1969 and some 14 years after the official desequestration of the villa that his constituent started the court action. That itself was quite a delay. As I understand it, the case has been complicated by counter-actions on the part of the tenant which had to be disposed of before the case of my hon. Friend's constituent could be resolved.

In the event, despite the delays, some progress has been made. Mr. Forsyth's ownership of the property was reaffirmed by the courts in October 1981. The courts have appointed a legal expert to help them unravel the facts of this case. In October of last year the court assessed the rent which the tenant should pay for the villa from 1 December 1969 to 31 December 1984. These are small but important gains. There is now a prospect that the legal expert who inspected the villa on 5 January—two weeks ago—will submit his report in the immediate future and that the case itself may be settled during the course of this year.

The Government are doing all they can to help my hon. Friend's constituent in this matter. We shall continue to do so. We believe that the best method of helping is through diplomatic representations. We hope they will prove effective.

As I have already indicated, we have made many representations to the Egyptian authorities on behalf of my hon. Friend's constituent. His case has been mentioned during the course of the most recent ministerial visits to Egypt. For example, my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State mentioned it when he saw the Egyptian Foreign Minister in January 1984. The British embassy in Cairo are in constant touch with Mr. Forsyth's legal adviser about the progress of both court cases. We have done, and will continue to do, everything we can to help him.

If my hon. Friend would like to bring Mr. Forsyth to meet me to talk about this matter, I should be ready to see my hon. Friend and to meet Mr. Forsyth at the same time, but on that occasion I do not believe that it would be profitable to have a debate about the strictly legal issues which are at present before the Egyptian courts. I hope that my hon. Friend will accept this point.

The Government have been very active on Mr. Forsyth's behalf. We have brought his concerns to the attention of the Egyptian Government on many occasions, but it is, alas, neither within our gift nor that of the Egyptian Government to settle the matter of full repossession and control of his villa. That case is before the Egyptian courts and it will be determined there, but we have made it very clear to the Egyptian Government that we feel there have been too many delays in reaching a decision—

The Question having been proposed after Ten o'clock on Wednesday evening, and the debate having continued for half an hour, MR. DEPUTY SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at eighteen minutes to One o'clock.