US Law Firm Confirms It Helped Two Myanmar Junta Cronies, 1 Firm Beat US Sanctions
US law firm Ferrari & Associates helped remove “two individuals and one company” with ties to the Myanmar junta from the US sanctions list recently, the company’s founder has confirmed.
A US Treasury notice in July announced that sanctions had been dropped against four Myanmar nationals—Jonathan Myo Kyaw Thaung (aka Jonathan Kyaw Thaung), Aung Hlaing Oo, Sit Taing Aung and Tin Latt Min—and an Indian, Deepak Subhash Jadhav, as well as companies they are connected to.
The move sparked anger among Myanmar people and human rights advocates, causing particular concern because all of the Myanmar individuals delisted are junta cronies, and three have been involved in supplying arms to the military junta.
UN Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews criticized the removals as “unconscionable” and a “shocking” turn in US policy that risked emboldening the junta and its enablers.
The four Myanmar individuals were sanctioned from 2022 to 2024 by the Biden administration for their shady links to the junta, involving among other things the supply of arms, aircraft and technology used by the regime’s military to kill its own people.
Following the US Treasury’s announcement, Erich Ferrari, the founder of Ferrari & Associates, boasted on LinkedIn that he had been “working on OFAC SDN delisting matters for the past 19 years, but have never had a triple removal action…until today.” OFAC stands for the Office of Foreign Assets Control, a Treasury Department office responsible for administering and enforcing sanctions. An SDN is a “specially designated national”—i.e., a person or entity that has been sanctioned.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Ferrari’s main areas of practice are assisting clients to comply with and address issues related to US trade sanctions. He mentions “OFAC SDN designation removal” as a specialty.
The Irrawaddy emailed Ferrari at the time to ask him if the “triple removal action” in his post referred to three of the four Myanmar individuals who were delisted and if so, which ones—but he did not reply.
But according to the Insight Myanmar podcast, in an interview it conducted with the lawyer, Ferrari “confirms that out of the four Burmese [Myanmar] individuals and companies that were delisted, two individuals and one company are his clients”. In introductory remarks preceding the interview, the podcast host added that, “Because of the attorney-client confidentiality, our guest can’t reveal the names of clients he represented and the nature of each legal case.”
When asked about Myanmar people and human rights advocates’ angry reactions to the delisting of Myanmar individuals, Ferrari said: “I’m in no way saying they can’t be angry [about this] or they shouldn’t have an opinion.”
In the interview, “he emphasizes that delistings are not based on whether a lawyer is persuasive, but on a determination by the US government that the legal criteria for designation are no longer met,” according to a summary of Ferrari’s comments on Insight Myanmar’s website.
The recent delisting has prompted concerns over a possible shift in US policy, especially in its Myanmar sanctions program. In the interview, however, Ferrari argues that the move isn’t significant from a policy perspective, noting that the cases had been pending since the early Biden administration, saying “two administrations have taken a look and determined that these people shouldn’t be on the list.”
“There’s no information I’m aware of that they’re rolling back enforcement or targeting under the Burma program,” he told the podcast host, adding that the delisting of the Myanmar individuals was “a process that relates to these specific individuals and companies and the specific information that they provided, and is reviewed on its merits.”
The US Treasury Department didn’t provide reasons for the removal of the Myanmar individuals from the sanctions list, and the White House has yet to comment.