There is little doubt that the issue of sanctions has come to increasing prominence in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. As a result, the sanctions landscape has undergone change, with increased enforcement activity. As sanctions can have legal, commercial and reputational implications for financial institutions, corporates and other entities and individuals, anyone that is affected by sanctions has to make sure they devise and undertake the most appropriate response.

Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, many Russian oligarchs have been targeted by European and U.S. sanctions. Both regimes create similar obligations, but do not have the same reach. For historical reasons, European asset freeze measures extend to assets or entities that are controlled by designated persons.  U.S. authorities have taken a pragmatic stance with a clear-cut 50%-ownership rule to extend asset freeze. The responsibility of identifying concealed assets is therefore shared: authorities gather intelligence on potential control and operators may rely on registered ownership. It avoids the burden of assessing the control. The latter notion, subjective by nature, creates a real challenge for European operators to identify such assets within complex structures over numerous jurisdictions – oligarchs have mastered the science of concealing their assets over the recent years. Luckily, some tools and data are available to help compliance officers with these tasks.

Companies in the European Union ("EU”) stand at the forefront of implementing EU restrictive measures (broadly speaking, sanctions) and are the first line of defence against those trying to evade or circumvent them. Although entities subject to EU law (EU operators) have borne that responsibility ever since the EU began to adopt sanctions, the measures introduced following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the complexities of today’s tumultuous world have significantly increased that burden. Today, EU operators must navigate a dynamic sanctions environment fraught with heightened legal and reputational risks. However, until recently, they have largely been left on their own to accomplish this challenging task. Nearly twenty years after the publication of the first guidance on EU sanctions implementation, the EU has yet to articulate a common holistic view on sanctions compliance expectations for the private sector.

The financial technology, or "fintech" sector has grown dramatically in recent years. The number of new fintechs increased by more than 70% globally between 2019 and 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic hastened technology adoption.  With this rapid rise in technological innovation, sanctions compliance officers are encountering novel challenges which are exacerbated both by 1) the inherent features of fintech solutions, such as reduced customer friction, seemingly borderless payments, and a reliance on a complex network of underlying financial partners; and 2) an increasingly unstable geopolitical climate that has resulted in ramped up complex sanctions and unique sanctions evasion techniques.  With this in mind, sanctions compliance officers in the fintech sector may be wondering how to develop and maintain a purpose-built sanctions compliance program tailored to their unique risk profile.  We share below some best practices for fintech sanctions compliance programs, leveraging our experience working with fintech firms across the world and guidance documents published by various authorities namely the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control’s ("OFAC") Framework for Compliance Commitments. This article’s goal is to help compliance professions in fintech firms globally build or improve their sanctions compliance set-up.

In July 2023 the Dutch government announced its intention to join the multilateral Agreement on the Control of Arms Exports between France, Germany, and Spain. The letter carrying the announcement simultaneously repealed the existing Dutch presumption of denial policy regarding arms exports to Saudi-Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. This article analyses these developments within the broader framework of the Netherlands and EU arms export controls. Its aim is to introduce the readers to challenges facing EU arms export controls, to explain the reasoning behind the Netherlands’ decision to join the agreement, and to describe some of the potential practical implications for the Dutch defence and security sector. The article finds that while the EU has been working towards a common European approach to arms export controls for over three decades, the EU Common Position (1st introduced in 2008) did not achieve the desired convergence on arms export policies.