As business slowly and cautiously reopens, cybercriminals lie in wait. A case study into a massive unemployment insurance fraud shows that cybercriminals patiently hunt for lucrative opportunities to strike. For that reason, companies reopening should consider conducting a cyber-audit to identify their cyber vulnerabilities and thwart cybercriminals lying in wait.
Over the past few months, numerous organizations and agencies—including the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force, UK Financial Conduct Authority, Dubai Financial Services Authority, and U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network—have stressed the need to preserve the integrity and security of the global payments system during and after the pandemic.
On May 15, 2020, the Small Business Administration (SBA) released the long-awaited Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Loan Forgiveness Application. Congress established the PPP as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), and the PPP is a key pillar in the Government’s response to the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The PPP allows eligible businesses to borrow up to ten weeks of payroll costs on favorable terms from private lenders, with the balance of the loan guaranteed by the SBA.
In an earlier post, here, we scrutinized the form and content of the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)’s March 6, 2020 guidance pertaining to the provision of humanitarian goods and assistance to the people of Iran consistent with U.S. sanctions.
In this concluding post, we discuss the factors the international community should consider before exporting medicine and medical devices to Iran.
On March 6, 2020 and in response to an outbreak of coronavirus in Iran, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued guidance pertaining to the manner in which humanitarian goods and assistance may be provided to the people of Iran consistent with U.S. sanctions against Iran.
This two-part post examines, first, the form and content of OFAC’s March guidance and, second, the related considerations any company or non-governmental organization (NGO) wishing to export medicine and medical devices to Iran still needs to bear in mind. Those considerations include ensuring the relevant items qualify under an existing medical general license and assessing whether their financial institutions will process related payments.
On April 20, 2020, the Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK) and its New York branch (IBKNY) (collectively, “the Bank”) entered into a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with the New York Attorney General, and a Consent Order (the “Consent Order”) with the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), to resolve violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations (ITSR), and various provisions of New York law. The transactions at issue exceeded $1 billion, and the Bank agreed to an overall penalty of $86 million.
SDNY imposed a $51 million forfeiture for the Bank’s willful failure to establish and maintain an anti-money laundering (AML) compliance program, finding that the Bank’s compliance failures were so extraordinarily egregious and sustained that the Bank specifically intended to violate its obligations under the BSA. NYDFS imposed a separate $35 million penalty for the Bank’s failure to maintain appropriate books, accounts, and records of all transactions as well as its failure to maintain an effective and compliant AML program. Notably, the settlement with NYDFS follows a 2016 Written Agreement between the Bank, NYDFS, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) (the “Written Agreement”), reached after regulatory examinations identified serious and protracted deficiencies in IBKNY’s BSA/AML compliance program and its efforts to comply with regulations of the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and New York State and federal laws.
Our new client alert covers the IBK settlements and their implications in more detail. We summarize the conduct that led to these settlements, which began nearly ten years ago. We discuss the extreme compliance deficiencies identified by the regulators and consider how the Bank’s repeated and protracted failures to address those critical deficiencies resulted not only in additional regulatory scrutiny but ultimately in criminal liability. We review the DPA and the Consent Order, and highlight the facts on which SDNY and NYDFS relied to find the Bank culpable. We then examine the lessons for US financial institutions and domestic branches of foreign banks.
On April 20, the U.S. Treasury Department said it would consider the Coronavirus pandemic’s impact of potentially reducing corporate resources as a mitigating factor in determining the appropriate response to sanctions violations. Something else was left unsaid.
In Kelly v. United States, 590 U.S. — (May 7, 2020), the Supreme Court recently reversed the federal fraud convictions of former public officials Bridget Kelly and William Baroni arising out of the Bridgegate scandal. The decision limits the applicability of the federal wire fraud statute to public corruption, and it will affect how such cases are investigated and tried in the future.
Although the rapid shift to telehealth is a boon to providers and patients, the federal government has issued specific guidance that providers need to follow. See tips for compliance provided by David Maria, a former federal prosecutor and member of the Department of Justice Medicare Fraud Strike Force, and Trevor Garmey, a Senior Associate with the Government Investigations and White Collar group. The tips are here on the Triage Health Law blog.
On March 31, 2020, the United Kingdom’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) levied its largest monetary penalty to date of GBP 20.47 million. OFSI penalized Standard Chartered for loans to Denizbank, a Turkish bank that was majority owned by Sberbank, a state-owned Russian bank. Accordingly, those loans violated European Union restrictions on making certain new loans or credit available to sanctioned Russian financial institutions. This enforcement activity may indicate that the United Kingdom regulator is prepared to ramp up its scrutiny of sanctions compliance and to impose increasingly severe penalties in response to violations.
