Sneaking in at the end of last year, OFSI (Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation HM Treasury) published their annual review. Or at least, the annual review running to March 2023, so a document that is some 9 months in the making!
Headlines, assuming that you can call them headlines given that the document is essentially out-of-date the moment that it was published, centred on Russian sanctions relating to the war in Ukraine, new cyber designations, and the growth of OFSI staff by 96 FTE. But no headline grabbing enforcement numbers. Between April 2022 and March 2023, OFSI issued just two monetary penalties with a combined value of £45,000.
As of March 2023 there were 3883 designations across 35 regimes, this compares to 3121 at March 2022, close to a 25% growth.
£21.6 billion of funds were reported to OFSI as frozen as of September 2022, an increase of £9.2 billion since 2021. In year reporting between February 2022 and October 2023 presents the impact of Russian sanctions with £22.7 billion of assets frozen.
It will be interesting to see the final impacts in the 2023-2024 report.