Rights advocacy group Justice For Myanmar has condemned the continued U.S. delisting of Myanmar cronies, following Washington’s removal of sanctions against an official of Myanmar military-linked Shwe Byain Phyu Group.
The U.S. Treasury Department removed from its sanctions list Theint Win Htet, a member of the founding family of the Shwe Byain Phyu Group, a Myanmar military-linked conglomerate with interests spanning mining, timber and petroleum trading.
Theint Win Htet, who was sanctioned by former President Joe Biden’s administration, has become the fifth Myanmar junta crony, including arms brokers, to be delisted by the Trump administration along with the companies they are connected to.
In August 2025, the Trump administration dropped sanctions against four Myanmar nationals: Jonathan Myo Kyaw Thaung (aka Jonathan Kyaw Thaung), Aung Hlaing Oo, Sit Taing Aung and Tin Latt Min.
Tin Latt Min is the mother of Theint Win Htet. Her father, Thein Win Zaw, remains on the U.S. sanctions list.
JFM said on Sunday: “The U.S. government must learn from the mistakes it made after the sham 2010 election and not appease a brutal military that commits genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity with impunity.
“The crisis in Myanmar continues to deepen and appeasement will only further embolden the junta to continue its campaign of terror against the people,” it said.
The rights group said the regime’s access to funds, arms and aviation fuel has allowed it to escalate attacks on civilian targets that amount to international crimes. It said sanctions should be widened to cover the full extent of the networks of companies and individuals enabling and profiting from the junta’s terror campaign.
Following the 2021 military coup that ousted the democratically elected civilian government led by democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, the Biden administration imposed sanctions on military officers, military-run companies and military-linked cronies and their companies for aiding or abetting the regime’s war crimes and violations of international law.
Its sanctions blocked Theint Win Htet’s U.S. credit cards, restricted her foreign bank accounts and forced her to abandon her master’s degree at Columbia University in New York. Recently she has been living in Thailand with her mother Tin Latt Min, according to Al Jazeera and Reuters.
According to those agencies, Washington-based law firm Ferrari & Associates, which specializes in sanctions cases, helped remove her from the U.S. list.
During an interview with The Insight Myanmar podcast, the law firm confirmed that of four Myanmar individuals and companies delisted by the U.S. in July last year, two individuals and one company were among its clients.
JFM said Shwe Byain Phyu Group took control of Telenor Myanmar, renamed ATOM Myanmar, in 2022. At that time, three business sources told The Irrawaddy that Khin Thiri Thet Mon, the daughter of coup leader Min Aung Hlaing, was an investor in Shwe Byain Phyu, which acquired an 80-percent stake in the telecom company.
ATOM Myanmar has since installed a commercialized version of China’s Great Firewall, giving what JFM described as the illegal junta unprecedented access to conduct surveillance on users.
Theint Win Htet has acted as a shareholder and director of One Telecom Company Limited, which was established during Shwe Byain Phyu’s acquisition of Telenor Myanmar.
In 2023, Theint Win Htet did an internship at ATOM Myanmar as a financial analyst while holding shares in Min Shwe Myine Enterprise Limited, a Myanmar petroleum company that formed a consortium in 2022 to find reliable suppliers from Russia “to tighten Myanmar Russian partnership,” JFM said.
In 2024, JFM reported Theint Win Htet to French authorities, requesting they freeze any of her assets in French territory and consider her removal from France, where she had been admitted to a school.