At the moment, the FCA's only powers over crypto businesses which do not carry on investment, payment services, e-money or other UK regulated business come from its role as their anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing supervisor. This will change in due course in respect of stablecoin businesses (with HMT consulting on bringing these into scope) and in respect of financial promotions of certain cryptoassets (both HMT and FCA are consulting on this). Read more

Changes to the UK's financial sanctions regime, introduced by the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 (the "Act"), came into force today (15 June 2022) and, with them, the power for the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation ("OFSI") to impose civil monetary penalties in respect of financial sanctions breaches on a strict liability basis (i.e. irrespective of any knowledge or suspicion). Read more

On 10 June 2022, the Law Commission (the "Commission") published its long promised "options paper" (the "Paper"), the next stage in the potential reform of the UK's corporate criminal liability laws. Read more

This briefing summarises the new Russia sanctions measures agreed in the EU's sixth sanctions package, and provides a round-up of other recent EU and UK sanctions developments since our last sanctions tracker update. Read more

This post provides an update regarding further Russia-related sanctions measures introduced by the United States on 8 May 2022. Read more

Herbert Smith Freehills' Corporate Crime and Investigations team has contributed to the Global Investigations Review. The article, 'Do companies have a moral duty to self-report to the SFO?' considers the recent SFO case involving Amec Foster Wheeler. Read more

The Russia sanctions position continues to be subject to rapid change. Our latest update summarises the newly announced sixth package of EU sanctions in response to the ongoing conflict with further updates to follow once more details on these measures are published. Read more

Our latest update on the sanctions response to the conflict in Ukraine summarises the new internet-related restrictions introduced by the UK, and provides a round-up of certain other recent UK and EU developments. Read more