You can buy a company’s assets, its customers, its brand, and guess what? Its sanctions violations. And sometimes the violation doesn’t exist until the day you close. Here’s what I mean. Under a sanctions program like Cuba and Iran, a foreign company owned by a U.S. buyer becomes subject to U.S. sanctions the moment the deal closes. Business that was lawful on Monday can be...
On October 5, the Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to 24 of the nation’s largest healthcare services companies, telling them that they have a legal obligation to give patients timely, accurate, and complete pricing information, and that failing to do so can be an unfair or deceptive practice under Section 5 of the FTC Act. The agency did not name the recipients. But the...
Companies that sell software often think of an export as a physical event: a box leaves the warehouse. The Commerce Department’s latest settlement with Lambda Research Corporation is a pointed reminder that for software companies, the export may be an automatic update pushed to a customer overseas months or years after the original sale. The Bureau of Industry and Security announced the settlement on Friday,...
On October 1, 2026, Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald issued Directive 26-12 to all personnel of the Department of Justice’s National Fraud Enforcement Division. The five-page memorandum, titled “Corporate Enforcement in the Fight Against Fraud,” is addressed to prosecutors, but compliance officers and general counsel should read it as if it were addressed to them. It identifies the fraud schemes that will receive priority, lists...
In this episode of Corruption, Crime and Compliance, Michael Volkov examines FinCEN’s April 2026 proposal to rebuild the Bank Secrecy Act AML program rule around an effectiveness standard, with a two-prong test requiring that programs be both established (risk-based, built on four core elements, and kept current) and maintained (implemented in all material respects), along with a new enforcement threshold for banks limited to significant...
You can buy a company’s assets, its customers, its brand, and guess what? Its sanctions violations. And sometimes the violation doesn’t exist until the day you close. Here’s what I mean. Under a sanctions program like Cuba and Iran, a foreign company owned by a U.S. buyer becomes subject to U.S. sanctions the moment the deal closes. Business that was lawful on Monday can be...
On October 5, the Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to 24 of the nation’s largest healthcare services companies, telling them that they have a legal obligation to give patients timely, accurate, and complete pricing information, and that failing to do so can be an unfair or deceptive practice under Section 5 of the FTC Act. The agency did not name the recipients. But the...
Companies that sell software often think of an export as a physical event: a box leaves the warehouse. The Commerce Department’s latest settlement with Lambda Research Corporation is a pointed reminder that for software companies, the export may be an automatic update pushed to a customer overseas months or years after the original sale. The Bureau of Industry and Security announced the settlement on Friday,...
On October 1, 2026, Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald issued Directive 26-12 to all personnel of the Department of Justice’s National Fraud Enforcement Division. The five-page memorandum, titled “Corporate Enforcement in the Fight Against Fraud,” is addressed to prosecutors, but compliance officers and general counsel should read it as if it were addressed to them. It identifies the fraud schemes that will receive priority, lists...
In this episode of Corruption, Crime and Compliance, Michael Volkov examines FinCEN’s April 2026 proposal to rebuild the Bank Secrecy Act AML program rule around an effectiveness standard, with a two-prong test requiring that programs be both established (risk-based, built on four core elements, and kept current) and maintained (implemented in all material respects), along with a new enforcement threshold for banks limited to significant...
If a $36 million export violation comes down to whether a loading dock worker grabbed the right box, the problem isn’t the guy on the dock. BAE Systems just paid $36 million to the State Department for more than 100 export control violations. Here’s what makes this case worth your attention. DDTC didn’t find willful evasion. It found something more common and, honestly, scarier: a...
The Justice Department unsealed an indictment on October 2 charging the CEO of a California technology company with orchestrating one of the largest alleged diversions of advanced U.S. computing chips to China to date. According to prosecutors, Greg Lui, who runs Earthmade Computer, arranged the purchase and shipment of more than $300 million worth of export-controlled servers containing advanced Nvidia processors, routing them through Malaysia...
In Part 1, I explained the twist that makes sanctions M&A risk different from FCPA M&A risk: when a U.S. company or U.S.-controlled fund takes ownership of a foreign business, that business can become subject to U.S. sanctions overnight, particularly under the Cuba and Iran programs, without changing a thing about how it operates. Part 2 covered cases involving inherited conduct and diligence misses. Part...
Part 1 of this series drew the analogy between buying an FCPA problem and buying a sanctions problem, explained why sanctions are worse because ownership by a U.S. person can itself create jurisdiction, and reviewed what OFAC’s 2019 Framework for Compliance Commitments says about mergers and acquisitions. Part 2 turns to the enforcement record. The four cases below share a common feature: in each one,...
Anyone who has spent time in the FCPA world knows the basic cautionary tale of M&A: you can buy a company and, with it, you can buy its bribery problem. Compliance professionals have spent two decades building pre-acquisition due diligence protocols around that idea. The same lesson applies to economic sanctions, but with a twist that makes the sanctions version in many ways more dangerous....
