Matt Stankiewicz, Senior Associate at The Volkov Law Group, rejoins us for a blog posting on OFAC sanctions law. Matt can be contacted at [email protected]. Sanctions law can be complex. The sanctions programs themselves are often a tangled web of do’s and don’t’s – various wind down periods, General Licenses, payment structures, and more. In order to enforce these laws and regulations, OFAC must necessarily...
NAVEX Global’s Hotline benchmark report (here) is an excellent annual report which helps companies to understand how well their hotline and incident management system is operating. The survey is based on over 1 million reports from 2,738 customers.The NAVEX report also is based on all types of reporting avenues, including hotlines and web-based systems. Interestingly, NAVEX noted that overall reporting rates remained consistent with 2016...
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) has promised to issue guidance on effective sanctions compliance programs. This is a long-anticipated update to prior information OFAC has released on the same subject. OFAC has raised the stakes for sanctions enforcement, especially with respect to Iran and Venezuela sanctions programs. So far this year, OFAC has announced a number of significant enforcement actions and...
Standard Chartered Bank certainly has its troubles. You know a company is in trouble, however, when it breathes a sigh of relief after paying nearly $1.1 billion in fines and penalties and compares itself to BNP Paribas, the global French bank, which paid over $8 billion for pervasive US sanctions violations. The Justice Department and OFAC have had a target-rich environment when reviewing global bank...
Stephen Cheng and Noah Smith, Associates at The Volkov Law Group, recently published an article on Law 360, How Warren Bill Would Change Liability For Corporate Execs. “If the criminal penalties in the Corporate Executive Accountability Act — recently proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — ever became law, they would usher in sweeping implications for the way big companies approach their legal compliance efforts.”...
Global banks are the poster children of sanctions violations and the importance of trade compliance. At the top of the heap is Standard Chartered Bank. In a long-awaited resolution of a multi-year investigation, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), the New York District Attorney’s (DANY), the Federal Reserve, the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) and the...
For criminal defense practitioners, it is easy to lose perspective when focused on FCPA, export control/sanctions and AML prosecutions. In the healthcare fraud area, prosecutors continue to aggressively enforce anti-kickback and fraud statutes through criminal prosecutions. The Justice Department has made its priority in this area clear – by dedicating law enforcement resources and prosecutors to investigating and prosecuting healthcare fraud schemes. As government participation...
In a significant False Claims Act enforcement action, DOJ announced settlements with three pharmaceutical companies – Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Lundbeck, and Alexion Pharmaceuticals – under which they agreed to pay $122 million to resolve allegations they violated the False Claims Act by paying Medicare of the Civilian Health and Medical Program (ChampVA) copayments for their own products through allegedly independent foundations that the companies used as...
Companies that depend on federal funding (e.g. healthcare, government contractors and university researchers) face significant risks for False Claims Act prosecutions. Relying on pro-government False Claims Act statutes, potential whistleblowers can earn enormous judgments by filing private actions under seal, and seeking federal government intervention in the matter, to prosecute False Claims Act violations. In those cases where the federal government agrees to intervene, the...
It is always easy to second-guess or look back with 20-20 hindsight on a compliance breakdown and point out all the problems that were ignored or created by corporate actors. There are common factual scenarios that recur in DOJ and regulatory enforcement actions, some of which fall into certain categories. While defense counsel (being effective advocates) often argue that bad actors are often “rogue” employees,...
