Ellen Hewitt

Ellen Hewitt is a Senior Managing Director in FTI Consulting’s Risk & Investigations practice. Ms. Hewitt supports domestic and multinational clients in resolving issues arising from fraud and malfeasance, sanctions and compliance failures, government regulation and enforcement, as well as event-driven crises. She has deep experience conducting internal investigations, transaction reviews, due diligence appraisals and systems evaluations and compliance controls testing related to the Bank Secrecy Act (“BSA”), anti-money laundering (“AML”) and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”).

For the past 10 years, Ms. Hewitt has provided investigative research and risk consulting services for matters stemming from regulatory enforcement actions, pre-transactional due diligence, activist investors and asset traces. She has consulted with clients on evaluating risks of money laundering, terrorist financing and sanctions violations. She has also managed ongoing in-depth, multijurisdictional due diligence and asset search investigations into international and domestic subjects using a wide range of public records, commercial databases and human source inquiries.

Prior to joining FTI Consulting, Ms. Hewitt worked as an analyst at a geopolitical risk consulting firm, where she conducted investigative research and risk assessments through open-source intelligence research and source inquiries in English and Russian.

Relevant Experience:

• Engaged on behalf of a major global financial institution to independently assess its OFAC compliance program as part of a multiyear consent order as required by the U.S. Federal Reserve; led a systems testing workstream to test the institution’s name list screening platform and alert review process to assess compliance, including data quality and screening configuration
• Provided Russia-focused enhanced due diligence and advisory services for a global financial institution seeking to review its sanctions and reputational risk exposure after the onset of the Ukraine war in February 2022
• Led an AML lookback review for a global cryptocurrency exchange to proactively identify instances of previously unreported suspicious activity after it determined its platform was being used to perpetrate a complex, clandestine money laundering scheme
• Led the investigations workstream for a major AML and sanctions investigation for one of the largest retail banks in the Nordic region; included providing strategic guidance and assisting counsel for ongoing regulatory requests and the publication of an extensive public investigation report