Inside this Topic Guide
Economic and financial sanctions seek to prevent the targeted individuals or entities from dealing with their funds and accessing financial services, and are backed by civil and criminal penalties. Compliance is not always straightforward, particularly where different sanctions programmes collide and impose conflicting obligations.
Recent events in Ukraine have resulted in a number of new, significant and coordinated sanctions being imposed by the US, the UK, the EU and other jurisdictions. See Ukraine crisis section.
Even prior to the February / March 2022 imposition of sanctions, over the last ten years or so, sanctions have become an increasingly hot topic for the global financial markets: several banks have been subject to significant financial penalties for failure to comply with financial sanctions programmes and there have also been some recent high profile developments in relation to certain countries such as Iran and Ukraine (which have been in place since 2014 as a consequence of events in the Crimea). It is therefore vital for companies, especially financial institutions engaging in a multitude of different transactions every day, to monitor their compliance with sanctions, ensure that they are not in breach of the relevant sanctions legislation and take advice on how sanctions should be specifically addressed in transaction documentation.
Other important developments in the area of sanctions have included the amendment of the EU Blocking Regulation - see under Client briefings and presentations.
This Topic Guide has a limited selection of content on US sanctions, please contact our experts in Washington listed below for further information.