U.S. sanctions laws restrict the flow of money, goods, information, or services between U.S. and certain non-U.S. persons—including financial institutions—and restricted countries, parties, and activities.
Our attorneys are experienced with helping multinational companies and financial institutions comply with U.S. sanctions. We can assist with any inquiry you may have.
For example, Wardlaw Trade Law can help you:
Big project? No problem. Where needed, we can also work with partners to audit your transactions, assess your restricted party screening software’s settings, and respond to a government subpoena or investigation.
Let us think about your sanctions issue through a holistic lens.
Transactions involving sanctioned countries may also implicate U.S. export controls. Restricted party screening programs catch parties that are sanctioned, export- controlled, restricted for import, and subject to other restrictions. When you build or assess your sanctions program, you need a law firm that can see the big picture.
Need to learn more about U.S. sanctions before you get started?
U.S. sanctions are primarily administered by the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”).
U.S. sanctions primarily take three forms:
While U.S. sanctions generally focus on restricting the actions of U.S. persons, they may also restrict the activities of non-U.S. persons by:
Let’s build a sustainable trade compliance framework aligned with your operations.
Monitoring U.S. sanctions restrictions can be more difficult than it first appears, for several reasons:
First, because OFAC does not keep a list of those jurisdictions with which it generally restricts business, which can make it hard to know where to start when building a risk-based compliance program. Currently, OFAC “comprehensively” sanctions Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and the Russian-occupied Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine. It has significant but non-comprehensive restrictions on Venezuela, Russia, Belarus, and Myanmar (Burma).
Second, because while OFAC does maintain public lists of restricted parties, such as its list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (the “SDN List”), screening your counterparties against these public lists is not enough: Many parties who are not listed are nonetheless “constructively” captured by the lists through OFAC’s “50% Rule” (capturing parties 50% or more owned, directly or indirectly, by one or more listed parties, when their interests are aggregated) or are subject to similar restrictions by regulation or executive order (like many blocked governments and their agencies and state-owned enterprises) without being directly incorporated into a list.
Finally, because each new round of sanctions must be read in the context of prior restrictions and authorizations to be fully understood, and these cumulative requirements are often spread across different documents and pages rather than being aggregated into one comprehensive source.
If you need expert help understanding U.S. sanctions, you are not alone!