US Looking to 'Drop the Hammer' on Export, Sanctions Violators, DOJ Official Says

DOJ and Commerce Department are increasingly looking to impose large penalties for significant export control and sanctions violations as part of a mission to incentivize more voluntary disclosures, said Matthew Olsen, DOJ’s assistant attorney general for national security. Olsen, whose agency and Commerce co-lead the new Disruptive Technology Strike Force, said he recently “made a couple of trips to companies directly” to speak with them about their compliance programs, and is hoping to “encourage” them to submit disclosures.

“We're serious about this,” Olsen said during a law conference in Washington last week hosted by Mayer Brown, the American Bar Association and American University. “When we find that there's a company that does not have a strong compliance program, or has failed to disclose, we're going to drop the hammer.”

Adam Hickey, a former senior official in DOJ’s National Security Division before joining Mayer Brown, said companies should closely review an indictment announced by the strike force last week that charged two Russian nationals in a scheme to illegally supply aviation parts to Russia (see 2305160047). He noted the parts seemed largely commercial, which means even if a company sells goods that aren’t “themselves inherently military or intelligence products,” the case “suggests you have to be attentive to where those are going.”

He also noted the Russian nationals lied to the U.S. aircraft parts supplier about the ultimate end-user, so there was “no suggestion of guilt or wrongdoing by the company there.” But “if you add up all the ingredients to that equation, I would suggest that the department is going to be looking for indications where that's not the case, where the company is witting or willfully blind to indications that controls or sanctions are being violated.”

Companies should be viewing the indictments in the “context of other DOJ emphasis on corporate crime,” Hickey added, including its new corporate enforcement policies that some law firms said could incentivize more voluntary disclosures (see 2302060034).

“I think the message at the moment,” Hickey said, “is report to us or else.”