US Law Firm Helped Myanmar Junta Cronies Beat Sanctions

U.S. law firm Ferrari & Associates appears to have played a key role in the recent removal of Myanmar junta-linked arms dealers, cronies, and their firms from the U.S. sanctions list.

A U.S. Treasury notice on Thursday 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.

All the Myanmar individuals were sanctioned from 2022 to 2024 by the Joe Biden administration for their shady links to the junta, involving among other things the supply of arms, aircraft, and technology, which the regime has been using to kill its own people.

Following the U.S. Treasury’s announcement that the sanctions had been lifted against the individuals on Thursday, Erich Ferrari, the founder of Ferrari & Associates, boasted on LinkedIn that he has 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.

“Very happy for our clients removed today, and very proud of our team of attorneys and investigators that worked on these matters,” Ferrari added.

The Irrawaddy emailed Ferrari 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.

Or perhaps he was counting individuals and firms as separate clients? The math suggests, at any rate, that at least one person and/or entity from Myanmar is among the clients Ferrari helped to remove from the list, and probably more.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Ferrari’s main areas of practice are assisting clients to comply with and address issues related to U.S. trade sanctions. He mentions “OFAC SDN designation removal” as a specialty.

Washington-based advocates said Ferrari has been involved with Myanmar cronies for many years and has many prominent figures and firms as clients. They allegedly include Shwe Byain Phyu, a junta-linked company with interests in gas stations, gem mining, telecoms, and logging.

Shwe Byain Phyu is owned by U.S.-sanctioned Thein Win Zaw, the husband of Tin Latt Min, who was among the four Myanmar nationals removed from the sanctions list last week. She was sanctioned in 2024, described as owning “various companies that are closely related to the regime.” Her adult children Theint Win Htet and Win Paing Kyaw have also been sanctioned.

Crony businesspeople have played a vital role under successive military regimes in Myanmar. Under the Than Shwe regime, which oppressed Myanmar from 1992 to early 2011, they not only supported the junta financially but acted as go-betweens to purchase military hardware to evade international sanctions while enriching themselves under military rule. That tradition continues to this day.

For example, the newly delisted Jonathan Kyaw Thaung was exposed by The New York Times and Justice for Myanmar as supplying the junta with European aircraft and guns among other things, circumventing Western sanctions.

Aung Hlaing Oo, meanwhile, facilitated arms deals with Eastern European countries, notably Ukraine and Serbia, while Sit Taing Aung acquired materials for arms factories and weapons production and was sanctioned in 2022.

The U.S. declined to explain why the sanctions were lifted. Since the 2021 coup, the Myanmar junta—faced with nationwide armed resistance—has responded with shelling and airstrikes, killing thousands of people, mostly civilians. These abuses have prompted multiple UN agencies to condemn the junta for grave violations amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity, and they continue to this day.

Early media reports suggested that the U.S. lifted sanctions on the four Myanmar arms dealers and cronies because Min Aung Hlaing—in a letter responding to a tariff warning—praised U.S. President Donald Trump and called for an easing of sanctions. But U.S. administration officials have denied any link between the letter and the sanctions decision, Reuters reported.

It quoted a senior Trump administration official as saying that “the decision to lift sanctions reflects a lengthy process that began in the prior administration,” suggesting that some Myanmar cronies had been lobbying, with the help of companies like Ferrari & Associates, for years.

The junta itself has a history of hiring foreign lobby firms. In March 2021, a month after the coup as the junta’s bloody crackdowns on protesters shocked the world, it hired Ari Ben Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence official and the director of lobbying firm Dickens & Madson, to argue its case, claiming that what happened on Feb. 1, 2021 was not a coup against the elected government of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The regime paid US$2 million to the firm.

Ben Menashe duly arranged a trip to Myanmar for CNN and the Southeast Asia Globe, but the outlets’ reports reflected the actual situation on the ground, rendering the lobbying campaign a failure.

SOURCE: The Irrawaddy

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