Seòmar agus comataidhean

The issue now moves to the chamber for all members to decide on, based on our report.

I thank the minister and her officials for joining us this morning. We will have a short pause to allow the minister to leave.

Thanks very much for raising that issue. When we were scrutinising the original LCM, there was quite a lot of good communication at that time. I would not like to say how that has continued as regards what we are considering today and in relation to amendments, but there was some pretty robust communication previously.

Our next item of business is consideration of a supplementary legislative consent memorandum on the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill. I am pleased to welcome the Minister for Community Wealth and Public Finance, Tom Arthur, and his officials: Sian Ledger, land reform policy and legislation team leader; George Dickson, detect and disrupt team leader; Michael Paparakis, civil law policy manager; and Patrick Down, criminal law practice and licensing unit team leader, all from the Scottish Government.

I refer members to paper 5.

I invite the minister to make his opening remarks on the supplementary LCM, after which we will move to questions.

Thank you, members and cabinet secretary.

Our next item of business, under item 2, is consideration of any final issues that we would like to include in our report on the supplementary legislative consent memorandum. I open up the floor to members again, so that they can raise any specific issues that they would like to be included in our report. We will then move on from there.

I am sorry—I did not quite hear that.

Again, I am more than happy to pick up that point and ask for some more information and detail on it. Are members happy with that?

Members indicated agreement.

If members have no further points to raise, that concludes our business for this morning. I will now close the meeting, and we will take a short break before moving into an informal private session.

Do any other members want to come in?

Thank you very much, minister. That was a very helpful overview.

We will now move to questions. I will ask the first one. Do we understand what the scale of the problem is at the moment in the UK, but also with reference to Scotland? I imagine that it is quite difficult to measure it, although we know that it is escalating. Are there any indicators of the scale of the problem?

Secondly, will you say a wee bit about the challenges that we might face in applying the new legislation?

I appreciate that those are quite big questions, but I would be interested to know the answers to them, given the online sphere that we are looking at.

A number of members want to come in. Jamie Greene will be first.