Timothy D. Belevetz is a partner in Holland &
Knight's
Washington, D.C., office
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has quietly ended its
four-year effort to prevent banks from providing credit and other
services to certain businesses that had been deemed controversial.
In an Aug. 16, 2017, letter to Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), Chairman
of the House Judiciary Committee, the DOJ stated that effective immediately it was
ending the program, known as Operation Chokepoint. The DOJ did
not widely announce the end of the program through a press release
or other public statement.
Operation Chokepoint was designed to curb fraud by choking off
wrongdoers' access to the national banking system, a
requirement for the operation of nearly every business, legitimate
or not. The initiative encouraged banks to deny services to certain
categories of businesses seen as posing high risk to consumers and,
accordingly, reputational risk to banks. Although the program was
focused on
