Leo Tsao

Leo Tsao is a partner in the Fintech & Payments and Investigations & White Collar Defense practices at Paul Hastings based in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office. Mr. Tsao’s practice focuses on internal corporate investigations, defense of criminal and regulatory enforcement actions, and compliance counseling. Before Paul Hastings, Mr. Tsao served for over 15 years as a white collar prosecutor with the DOJ, where he led or supervised many significant cases involving the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), and other white collar crimes.

Most recently, Mr. Tsao served as the Principal Deputy Chief of the DOJ’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS) and as Chief of MLARS’s Bank Integrity Unit. At MLARS, he was responsible for overseeing the DOJ’s enforcement program against financial institutions for BSA, money laundering, and similar violations, including criminal charges, deferred prosecution agreements, and non-prosecution agreements involving financial institutions. Mr. Tsao was also involved in drafting the DOJ’s Cryptocurrency Enforcement Framework. Before MLARS, Mr. Tsao spent three years as an Assistant Deputy Chief in the Fraud Section’s FCPA Unit and eight years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.