What You Need To Know

• The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued six new general licenses, and updated a seventh that allow for many activities related to: the export of Venezuelan oil and petrochemical products from Venezuela; the exploration, development, and production of oil, gas, and petrochemical products in Venezuela; the generation, transmission, storage, or distribution of electricity in Venezuela; the export to Venezuela of U.S.-origin diluents; negotiating for investment in the oil, gas, petrochemical, and electricity sectors in Venezuela; and the export of Venezuelan gold.
• The new general licenses contain a number of significant conditions, including in GLs 46B and 51, a limitation to the activities of “established U.S. entities,” and in GLs 46B, 47, 48A, 50A, and 51, limits on counterparties and operators, a prohibition on the involvement of entities with specific relationships to China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, or of sanctioned vessels, and contractual requirements to use U.S. law and U.S. dispute resolution mechanisms.
• This regulatory space is fast moving, with multiple changes occurring over a short time period, and any plan to rely on these general licenses and authorizations should include transaction-by-transaction assessment, along with monitoring by compliance and legal functions.

What You Need to Know

Key Takeaway #1: FinCEN will no longer require covered financial institutions to identify and verify beneficial owners of legal entity customers each time the customer opens a new account at the institution, but rather only in certain circumstances.

Key Takeaway #2: FinCEN will instead require certain financial institutions to identify and verify the identities of such beneficial owners: (1) when a legal entity customer first opens an account with a covered financial institution; (2) when the covered financial institution has knowledge of facts that would reasonably call into question the reliability of beneficial ownership information previously obtained about the legal entity customer; and (3) as needed based on a covered financial institution’s risk-based procedures for conducting ongoing customer due diligence. For (3), covered financial institutions may rely on the customer’s certification that its beneficial ownership information has not changed, unless there is reason to question this.

Key Takeaway #3: The exceptive relief is the latest instance of recent efforts by the Department of the Treasury to modernize and eliminate unnecessary burdens associated with BSA rules; covered financial institutions are likely to welcome the relief.

Key Takeaways:

1. The Russian Federation, Bolivia and the British Virgin Islands (“BVI”) have been added to the EU list of third countries deemed high risk for AML/CTF purposes.
2. The EU has removed Burkina Faso, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania from this list.
3. The EU’s position redefines the risk landscape for entities with exposure to Russian, Bolivian, and BVI organisations or individuals, and consequently increases commercial pressure on EU/Russian relationships with extensive global sanctions already imposed due to the ongoing Russia/Ukraine conflict.

On December 19, 2025, New York Governor Kathy Hochul vetoed a bill that would have amended the New York LLC Transparency Act (“New York Act”) to include beneficial ownership information (“BOI”) reporting requirements for all non-U.S. and U.S. limited liability companies (“LLCs”) registered to do business in New York State (“New York”).

The Governor’s veto means that the New York Act willonly require disclosure of BOI only for non-U.S. LLCs registered to do in business in New York that do not otherwise qualify for any of the exemptions in the New York Act, and only with respect to non-U.S. beneficial owners.

Yesterday, FinCEN announced an ongoing enforcement initiative against more than 100 money services businesses (“MSBs”) operating along the Southwest U.S. border. FinCEN says that it reviewed over one million currency transaction reports (“CTRs”) and 87,000 suspicious activity reports (“SARs”) using new data processing techniques to identify potential Bank Secrecy Act (“BSA”) compliance concerns with MSBs there. The agency says this resulted in six FinCEN Notices of Investigation, “dozens” of referrals to the IRS, and 50 compliance outreach letters. An accompanying video from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggests that the initiative is intended to “stop terrorist cartels, drug traffickers, and human smugglers” and to “root out potential cartel-related money laundering from the U.S. financial system.”