The United Kingdom’s Export Control Organization has launched a newsletter, pithily titled “Compliance Newsletter.” In its premier four-page issue, we learn that the ECO is big on warning letters, boasting that it has issued 50 of them since establishing procedures for warning letters a year ago.

The newsletter also notes that an unnamed company agreed to settle export charges for £575,000 ($880,000). The newsletter’s description of the settlement is a treasure trove of useful information:

In April 2009, a UK company paid a compound penalty of £575,000 for alleged offences in relation to the export of controlled goods to a number of sensitive destinations without licences between 2003 and 2006.
 
Compounding is the means by which HMRC can settle out of court a case which would normally be prosecuted to save both the tax payer and the company time and legal fees.

That’s it. Those 66 words are the entire entry on the settlement, or about £8,700 ($13,000) per word. There is no mention of the identity of the company, the goods exported, the number of exports, the destinations, or the value of the goods. This blog often complains about the paucity of information given by U.S. export agencies in announcements of export settlements, but in comparison to the ECO’s stingy announcement, the U.S agencies are releasing disclosures the length of a 17th century epistolary novel — OFAC, perhaps, excluded.

In fact, the monthly newsletter of the East Anglia Society for the Protection of Water Voles and Stoats is longer and packed with more information than the ECO’s new newsletter.

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