A Texas-headquartered offshore drilling company is filing a voluntary disclosure with the Office of Foreign Assets Control after its former Russian subsidiary may have breached U.S. sanctions, according to corporate filings.
OFAC
The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) administers and enforces various economic and trade sanctions programs. It sanctions people and entities by adding them to the Specially Designated Nationals List, and it maintains several other restricted party lists, including the Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies List, which includes entities subject to certain investment restrictions.
Banks that choose not to follow a set of export compliance best practices recently issued by the Bureau of Industry and Security may be leaving themselves “wide open” to possible penalties under U.S. export regulations, a senior BIS official said, especially if they don’t have other compliance safeguards in place.
Vietnam Beverage Company Limited reached an $860,000 settlement with the Office of Foreign Assets Control after the agency said two of the company’s subsidiaries violated U.S. sanctions against North Korea. OFAC said the subsidiaries, which produce and sell alcoholic drinks, illegally received more than $1.4 million in payments through U.S. banks for sales of alcohol to North Korea.
The U.S. this week sanctioned people and companies involved in a sanctions evasion network for the terror group Hezbollah and others that help produce and transport Captagon, an addictive amphetamine, to help fund the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria.
The U.S. last week expanded an Iran-related sanctions authority to target the country’s petroleum and petrochemical sectors and designated a host of entities and vessels that it said have shipped or traded Iranian oil products.
The U.S., U.K. and Australia this week sanctioned a group of people and entities that they said have ties to Russian cybercriminal group Evil Corp., which the Office of Foreign Assets Control designated in 2019 for its international hacking campaigns.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned an Iranian military official and six employees of an Iranian cybersecurity company for interfering in the 2024 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections.
Notable language included in the U.K.’s regulations for its new Office of Trade Sanctions Implementation (see 2409130015) allows the agency to share information about possible violations with “any other regulatory body,” including those outside the U.K., Akin said in a client alert. The law firm said it expects to see OTSI “working closely with a range of sanctions coordinators globally to ensure trade sanctions operate effectively in cross-border matters.”
The Office of Foreign Assets Control this week sanctioned five Colombian nationals and two Mexican businesses for ties to illegal drug trade.
Companies should continue to expect an “aggressive” U.S. sanctions enforcement landscape heading into next year, and should consider increasing the amount of due diligence they undertake if they haven’t already, panelists said during an event last week about sanctions compliance.