Sanctions & Export Controls

Sanctions and export controls compliance is a complex and evolving concern for companies and individuals with international interests and commercial liabilities. The team has extensive expertise in the field of commercial sanctions and export controls. With our global footprint, members of the team have experience in navigating the sensitive commercial and public policy considerations which are often engaged in this area of law to provide pragmatic advice to our clients on multi-jurisdictional matters.

We regularly represent and advise clients on sectoral sanctions risks relating to prospective commercial transactions, helping them navigate the interaction between UN Security Council resolutions and EU and US law, the EU Blocking Regulation, and the US secondary sanctions regime, as well as the scope and effect of the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) and the post-Brexit statutory framework of the UK sanctions regimes.

Members of the team are often retained to advise and act for corporate entities faced with sanction and compliance investigations by governments including the Office of Financial Sanctions Institutions (“OFSI”) in the UK and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) in the US. They also frequently represent corporates in substantive challenges against US, EU and UK designations.

We also have broad experience in dealing with licensing authorities and government agencies in the UK and overseas. Members of the team are often engaged to advise companies which have been affected by sanctions and export controls on the licences required to comply with the applicable regime so that the commercial operations which have been disrupted can begin or resume.

More widely, Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) and International Financial Institutions (IFIs), such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, each have their own investigative offices and have established their own sanctions and debarment frameworks in order to pursue entities alleged to have engaged in prohibited practices (such as fraud and corruption) on MDB-funded projects.

Members of the team have represented companies and individuals before both the World Bank’s Sanctions Board in Washington DC and the Asian Development Bank’s Integrity Oversight Committee in Manila and have also been instructed by the investigative offices of MDBs themselves (including the African Development Bank). Two members of the team were appointed Sanctions Officer and Sanctions Appeals Officer respectively at the Caribbean Development Bank in 2020. The Business Crime and Regulation team is also regularly instructed to conduct internal investigations for UN-specialised agencies. With fluent Spanish and French speakers and admissions to non-English bars (e.g., New York), as well as considerable experience of the Latin American and Caribbean region, the Business Crime and Regulation team members have an excellent cultural understanding of different business practices.

Outer Temple’s Business Crime and Regulation team is frequently invited to hold sanctions and export controls workshops and speak at economic compliance seminars.

Members of the team have contributed to key practitioner texts focusing on economic sanctions, including Oxford University Press’s Smith, Owen, and Bodnar on Asset Recovery – Criminal Confiscation and Civil Recovery and Lexis Nexis’s Lissack and Horlick on Bribery and Corruption.