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OFAC License Requests Highlight Banks’ Due Diligence Challenges, Compliance Risks

By Brian Monroe

U.S. Treasury documents involving companies that sought exemptions from economic sanctions, including nearly two dozen U.S. and international financial institutions, illustrate the lengths banks must go to avoid violating sanctions laws and detail their efforts to avoid penalties when they discover they are doing business with a sanctioned entity. In a handful of instances, banks began processing transactions and letters of credit that they subsequently discovered aided sanctioned Iranian or other designated entities, according to an analysis published Thursday by the New York Times of more than 10,000 Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) licenses issued over the past decade....

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