On March 7, Zhongxing Telecommunications Equipment Corporation and its subsidiaries and affiliates, as well as ZTE Kangxun Telecommunications Ltd. and its subsidiaries and affiliates (collectively referred to as ZTE or ZTE Corporation) entered into a guilty plea with the U.S. Department of Justice and “agreed to pay a $430,488,798 penalty to the U.S. for conspiring

Continuing a trend toward greater judicial scrutiny of Department of Justice (DOJ) plea agreements first seen in the district court’s action in the Fokker case, Ed Kinkeade, a U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Texas, revised the guilty plea submitted to him by ZTE and the DOJ to reject the corporate monitor

The months of November and December saw major steps by both the U.S. and the United Nations targeting the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) nuclear and ballistic missile programs. First, on November 9, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) published a final rule imposing correspondent banking restrictions on U.S. financial institutions