Tweet According to an article from Iran, summarized in CoinDesk, it seems that the Central Bank of Iran may have agreed to a policy of working with digital currency exchanges in Iran to provide the connective banking relationships to facilitate international transactions of the movement of digital currencies and money in and out of Iran. […]
Tweet An Iranian foreign national living in the US, Mahin Toussi Mojtahedzadeh, was sentenced to 443 days in jail in the US, for conspiring to unlawfully export gas turbine parts from the US to Iran, using a company in Richmond Hill, Ontario. She is being removed from the US and deported back to Iran. Mojtahedzadeh […]
Tweet Unsealed criminal complaint The US Attorney for the SDNY, together with the FBI yesterday announced the arrest of Virgil Griffith, a cryptocurrency advisor, in connection with technical services he allegedly provided to educate the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (“North Koreaâ€) on sanctions avoidance and money laundering. Griffith was the subject of a criminal […]
Tweet Russian on OFAC list launches a coin The Kharon Brief has an interesting article here about Aleksei Muratov, also spelled Aleksey Muratov, a Ukrainian on the OFAC sanctions list here, who founded, launched and owns an initial coin offering called PRIZM. Donetsk People’s Republic Muratov lives in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. According to […]
Tweet The president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, delivered a speech over the weekend in Iran alleging massive corruption by senior government officials, and claimed that over $700 million is gone that was under the control of the Minister of Petroleum, Bijan Namdar Zangeneh, and a further $2 billion is unaccounted for in foreign countries in […]
Tweet Last week, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC“) designated several people associated with the most powerful drug cartel in Mexico, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion (meaning the new generation cartel of Jalisco), as drug kingpins. Added to the drug kingpin sanctions list is a Mexican Judge, Isidro Avelar Gutierrez, […]
Tweet Last Wednesday, the White House issued an executive order (the “Order“) under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, 50 U.S.C. 1701, the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1601, and §301 of Title 3 of the United States Code, prohibiting transactions of hardware, software or other products or services that enable information processing, data processing, data storage, data retrieval or electronic […]
Tweet Rifaat al-Assad, the uncle of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, is facing permanent asset forfeiture in France in connection with unexplained wealth and asset accumulation in France. He was charged in France last month with corruption, money laundering and embezzlement of state assets from Syria. He was ordered to remain in France. He is a politically […]
Tweet The US government unsealed a federal forfeiture complaint this week, seeking in rem forfeiture of a cargo ship that was used for sanctions avoidance to benefit North Korea which used US correspondent banks to engage in sanctions avoidance. The case has no tie to the US except for the use of correspondent banks and […]
Tweet The Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) published a framework for sanctions compliance yesterday which describes the sanctions compliance program standards for US legal and natural persons and for US-origin goods or services. The framework mirrors the requirements for a competence AML program and includes: commitment from the top down […]