OFSI matters analytically for one reason above all: the UK test is broader than the US one.
Owned or controlled
UK financial sanctions catch entities that are owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by a designated person. The control limb has no percentage in it.
A structure engineered to leave a designated person owning forty-nine per cent of a company falls outside OFAC’s automatic fifty per cent rule and is squarely inside the UK asset freeze if the designated person still controls the entity. Anyone treating “the fifty per cent rule” as a universal principle is reasoning about one jurisdiction and applying the answer to another.
Strict liability, since June 2022
OFSI can impose a monetary penalty on the civil standard of proof — the balance of probabilities — without establishing that the firm knew or had reasonable cause to suspect it was in breach.
That was not always so. Section 146 of the Policing and Crime Act 2017 originally required OFSI to show knowledge or reasonable cause to suspect. The Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 removed that limb and inserted a subsection directing that any statutory requirement for the person to have known, suspected or believed any matter “is to be ignored” for this purpose. The change took effect on 15 June 2022.
The practical consequence is a materially lower threshold than the knowledge standards that operate in some other regimes, and it changes what a firm has to be able to demonstrate. Knowledge and suspicion have not disappeared entirely — OFSI still weighs them as case factors when setting the size of a penalty — but they are no longer part of the test for liability.
What it publishes
Penalty decisions are published with a narrative of the breach, and they are among the more readable enforcement documents in this area because they are written for a general audience.