Maybe its a sign of the times, but yesterday I witnessed a group of tweeters (not sure if this is the proper nomenclature) petitioning the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) to remove the name of Corporacion Deportiva America from the OFAC Specially Designations Nationals and Blocked Persons List (“SDN List”). The amazing part was that the U.S. Department of the Treasury actually responded….via Twitter. According to a tweet posted yesterday by @USTreasury, “Coporacion Deportiva America will remain on the OFAC List as long as information shows ownership or control is linked to designated persons.”

My jaw hit the ground when I saw this. OFAC’s Office of Global Targeting rarely responds to anything, even when you courier over written requests and submissions and you fax and email those submissions directly to the Assistant Director of the Counter Narcotics Designation Division (I’m not bitter). So you can imagine how surprised I was to see that the U.S. Treasury would respond to a series of tweets regarding an entity designated under Executive Order 12978 and the Columbia Counter Narcotics Sanctions Regulations. Granted, @USTreasury did not say anything too revealing or promising, however, it did let on that once Corporacion Deportiva America was no longer owned or controlled by designated persons that the SDNT designation would be removed. This prompted the petitioning tweeters to request who those designated persons were. At that point your humble author interjected into the discussion the names of at least two designated individuals which OFAC believes to own or control Corporaction Deportiva America. This information is publicly available and is typically denoted in an OFAC designation of the individual with either a “c/o” or a “linked to”.

I believe what prompted this whole occurrence was the fact that there was a large scale removal of Columbia individuals and entities designated under Executive Order 12978 from the SDN List yesterday. Moreover, based on some very cursory research I did on the subject, it seems a few designated individuals linked to Corporacion Deportiva America have already been removed to the list with some of those removals going back as far as 2009. Yet Corporaction Deportiva America remains on the list and a number of tweets are wondering why? I guess all of this begs the question: what’s more effective an administrative reconsideration under 31 C.F.R. 501.807? Or a massive twitter campaign? My money is still on the former, but at least Treasury will answer you if you pursue it through the latter.

The author of this blog is Erich Ferrari, an attorney specializing in OFAC matters. If you have any questions please contact him at 202-280-6370 or ferrari@ferrari-legal.com.