The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill, which is set to introduce, among key reforms, a new failure to prevent fraud offence, is in the final stages of the Parliamentary process. The Bill is expected to receive Royal Assent by the end of this year. Read more

On 31 August 2023, the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation ("OFSI") published several updates to its Enforcement Guidance. These provide some further clarity about OFSI's assessment of financial sanctions breaches, and approach to its power to publish details of a financial sanctions breach where it has decided not to impose any monetary penalty (a "Disclosure Report"). Read more

The UK introduced restrictions on the provision of legal services to Russia in June 2023 (as summarised in our previous post). Since then, the legal industry has raised a number of concerns about the drafting of the relevant legislation, culminating in the issuance of a new general licence (the "GL") which seeks to address some of the most significant unintended consequences arising from the new restrictions. In this post, we review the provisions of the GL and the remaining issues with these restrictions, as well as providing a round-up of key recent Russia sanctions developments in the UK and EU. Read more

On August 9, 2023, President Biden issued an Executive Order (the “Executive Order”) restricting certain U.S.  investments in Chinese companies which produce technologies and products raising US national security concerns.” On the same day, the Treasury Department issued an “Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” (“ANPR”) commencing the process to issue regulations imposing the new investment restrictions. Read more

In June 2022, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) proposed a number of sweeping enforcement-related reforms which would have, among others, significantly enhanced the SFC’s ability to obtain investor compensation orders against regulated persons who had committed wrongdoing if enacted. Read more

This week, the FSB (Financial Stability Board) published its final set of recommendations for regulating cryptoassets and related services. The recommendations follow on from the FSB’s previous public consultation. The guidelines are designed to provide a common base for international regulatory coverage of an otherwise borderless technology and product in respect of which regulatory development … Read more

On 13 July 2023, the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) and the Accounting and Financial Reporting Council (AFRC) (formerly known as the Financial Reporting Council) issued their first joint statement (Joint Statement). This comes less than a year after the new regulatory regime of the accounting profession came into operation. Read more

The UK Supreme Court has handed down its seminal judgment in Philipp v Barclays Bank UK plc [2023] UKSC 25, considering the application of the so-called Quincecare duty to the victim of an “authorised push payment” (APP) fraud. In an APP fraud, the victim is induced by fraudulent means to deliberately authorise their bank to send a payment to a bank account controlled by the fraudster. Read more