New UK Sanctions Agency Leader Asks for Patience as Office Ramps Up
Companies shouldn’t expect a significant amount of early enforcement action from the U.K.’s new Office of Trade Sanctions Implementation, which isn’t yet a finished product, its leader, Anna Deibel-Jung, said last week.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
“We’re still quite new,” Deibel-Jung said during a Feb. 13 webinar hosted by risk intelligence firm Kharon. The agency was launched in October to oversee and enforce trade restrictions for controlled goods and services moving or being provided outside the U.K. (see 2410100010, 2409130015 and 2502040042).
Deibel-Jung said the U.K. is “pleased with how successfully” the OTSI launch has gone, but just because it’s “up and running” doesn’t mean it will be able to “do lots of things very, very quickly.”
“Our powers are working, all of our processes are working,” she said. “But as you will understand with a new unit like this, there are things maturing. There’s always a big difference in thinking about what your role will be in the abstract before you have powers and then actually having powers and putting them into practice and doing all of the learning that you would expect at the back of that.”
OTSI is so far “doing lots of work on things like looking at emerging trends,” Deibel-Jung said. “But bear with us. That will take time for us to see patterns, see typologies, and start to then push that back out to the industry so that we can share the benefits of what we’re seeing.”
Deibel-Jung said one of OTSI’s early goals is to increase U.K. "engagement" with companies and others about U.K. sanctions and trade rules. She said many of the companies OTSI oversees aren’t necessarily based in London, unlike major industries like the financial sector.
“What we really want to do more of is reach the hard-to-reach places,” she said. “That's where we really want to focus. We want to get out of London.”