Last month, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, together with the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI), issued joint guidance on their approach to the ‘ownership and control test’, which determines the scope of UK asset freeze sanctions.

Guidance alone is, however, unlikely to address the problems caused by the UK’s ownership and control test in practice.

In this article for LexisNexis Corporate Crime expert, Alistair Jones and Diana Czugler discuss the importance of the ownership and control test and some of the consequences of getting it wrong.

They also review what the position was before the guidance was issued, together with two recent cases that reached inconsistent conclusions, before turning to some of the uncertainties still remaining after its publications and asking whether it adds to the confusion.