FinCEN's safe harbor: why a legal Venezuela payment still had nowhere to go
Washington did not issue another license — it removed the bank's fear of moving the money. Two bodies of law govern a wire transfer into a sanctioned country, one that permits and one that watches, and until now only one had moved.
A Miami bank can be handed a Venezuela transaction that is perfectly legal — cleared by OFAC, paperwork in order — and still turn it down. Not because of the law that prohibits, but because of the law that watches. That "no", repeated for years across almost the whole of US banking, is what the Treasury has just tried to dismantle. On July 27 its anti-money-laundering arm, FinCEN, committed to not pursuing banks that move reconstruction money into Venezuela. It did not issue another license; it took away the bank's fear. That distinction looks technical, and it may do more to change the actual flow of money into the country than anything else this year.
When a US bank considers a transfer into a sanctioned country, two separate sets of rules, with separate enforcers, decide whether it goes through. The first is the sanctions regime administered by OFAC, which defines which transactions are permitted. Since 2025 a run of general licenses has authorized oil, telecoms and humanitarian activity. That side has been moving in plain view.
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