MassPoint PLLC Blog

Sanctions, emerging technologies, and export controls law and policy insights.
Critical Resources

Guidance for Responsible Agricultural Supply Chains

This update briefly discusses aspects of the FAO-OECD Guidance for Responsible Investment in Agricultural Supply Chains (the “Guidance”), which is open for public comment through February 20, 2015. Among other things, the Guidance proposes a risk-based due diligence approach for adoption by enterprises engaged in the agricultural supply chain. Elements of the risk-based due diligence approach are outlined (with some comment) below, followed by considerations for sovereign and private investors, food-agri companies, and finance providers (e.g., commercial banks).

Agriculture Investment

Compliance for Financial Institutions: Anticorruption – AML Nexus

Enforcement authorities in the US and Asia reportedly are investigating financial institutions for potentially corrupt employment and business relationships with family members of government officials. The investigations underscore policy links between anti-corruption and anti-money laundering regimes where dealings with Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) are involved.

This article, published by Hdeel Abdelhady in Butterworths Journal of Banking and Financial Law, briefly discusses the pending investigations and the anti-corruption-AML policy nexus, and suggests, with respect to PEPs and more generally, that financial institutions facilitate fluidity in their compliance programs to allow for the sharing of information and adaptation of compliance protocols across (sometimes impermeable) internal functional and disciplinary lines.

MassPoint Legal and Strategy Advisory PLLC

Egypt Needs a Mindset Revolution (to transition economically)

Ultimately, the success of Egypt’s political transition will be measured not at the ballot box, but at the breadlines. Egypt needs a national economic vision to transform its political aspirations into reality. But first the country must undergo a national mindset revolution. Egyptians must ask themselves and their leaders the clichéd question: where do they see themselves in the next five, 15, or 50 years? Will Egypt remain a foreign aid recipient whose fortunes twist in unpredictable political winds? Will its economic path continue to be paved with off-the-rack structural adjustments thought up in the halls of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund? Will Egyptians continue to accept — and expect — economic mediocrity? The answers, and Egypt’s future, will depend on the health of the national mindset.

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