DOJ launches new effort to target corporate sanctions evasion
By Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced a new effort by the Justice Department on Thursday to target corporate sanctions evasion and other financial crimes that implicate national security.
“To address the increasing intersection of corporate crime and national security, the Department is today announcing significant restructuring and resource commitments within the National Security Division,” Monaco at the American Bar Association National Institute on White Collar Crime Thursday.
“Companies are on the front lines of today’s geopolitical and national security challenges,” she said. “Increasingly, corporate criminal investigations carry profound national security implications.”
As part of that effort, Monaco said, the Justice Department’s National Security Division will hire more than 25 new prosecutors to investigate “sanctions evasion, export control violations, and similar economic crimes.” Monaco said.
The National Security Division will also issue new guidelines to the US Commerce and Treasury departments to on what prosecutors expect from them to assist with national security-related compliance enforcement, she added.
In addition, DOJ will make a “substantial investment” in the department’s Bank Integrity Unit in the Criminal Division’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section, Monaco said, to help investigate and prosecute international sanctions violations.
“Across the Department and across the globe, we are handling corporate investigations that involve sanctions evasion—in industries as varied as transportation, financial technology, banking, defense, and agriculture,” Monaco said.
The Justice Department has brought several sanctions violations cases in the past year. Most notably, prosecutors secured the first-ever corporate guilty plea to material support for terrorism from a French cement company last October. The Company, Lafarge SA, admitted to making millions of dollars of payments that supported ISIS and another terrorist organization as part of an effort to maintain its operations in Syria as the civil war escalated.
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