by H. Christopher Boehning, Jessica S. Carey, Michael E. Gertzman, Roberto J. Gonzalez, Brad S. Karp, Richard S. Elliott, Rachel M. Fiorill, and Karen R. King
On November 27, 2018, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) announced a nearly $90,000 settlement agreement with Virginia-based Cobham Holdings, Inc. (“Cobham”), a global provider of technology and services in aviation, electronics, communications, and defense, on behalf of its former subsidiary, Aeroflex/Metelics, Inc. (“Metelics”).[1] The settlement involves three shipments of goods through distributors in Canada and Russia to an entity that did not appear on OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (the “SDN List”), but was blocked under OFAC’s “50% rule” because it was 51% owned by a company sanctioned under the Russia/Ukraine sanctions program. This is the second OFAC action of which we are aware that has relied on the 50% rule. The apparent violations appear to have been caused by Metelics’s (and Cobham’s) reliance on deficient third-party screening software.
While difficult to predict, OFAC’s decision to pursue this action—involving only three shipments, a violation of the 50 percent rule, and where the root cause of the apparent violations is attributable to deficient sanctions screening software—may signal a raising of OFAC’s compliance expectations, consistent with Treasury Under Secretary Sigal Mandelker’s warning in a recent speech that private sector companies “must do more to make sure [their] compliance systems are airtight.”[2]
Below, we describe the settlement, OFAC’s penalty calculation, and several lessons learned. Continue reading