Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is releasing the second video in its “OFAC Basics” video series, "My Funds Are Blocked, Now What?" This video provides viewers with guidance on what it means when funds are blocked in connection with OFAC sanctions, as well as recommended steps for what to do if your funds have been blocked.
Two men pleaded guilty July 9 to conspiracy to commit export control violations for their roles in a global procurement scheme on behalf of sanctioned Russian companies, including Russian military companies. Some of the electronic components shipped by the defendants were later found in seized Russian weapons platforms and signals intelligence equipment in Ukraine. Salimdzhon Nasriddinov, 53, a Brooklyn resident and dual citizen of Russia and Tajikistan, was arrested on Oct. 31 in Brooklyn. Nikolay Goltsev, 38, of Montreal and an associate who pleaded guilty in February were arrested at a hotel in Manhattan on Oct. 31 during a trip to New York to visit Nasriddinov.
Former Chief Counsel for the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), Jason Prince joined Akin’s Washington office in April 2024. The Export Practitioner caught up with him to see how he’s settling in.
Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) published guidance outlining the different actions that BIS takes to inform industry and academia about parties – beyond those identified on public screening lists like the Entity List – that present risks of diversion of items subject to BIS export controls to countries or entities of concern. Thew guidance also contains a new recommended best practice asking that exporters, reexporters, and transferors of Common High Priority List (CHPL) items screen transaction parties using online resources made newly available by the Trade Integrity Project (TIP).
The Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force (FLETF), released an updated Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) Strategy to Prevent the Importation of Goods Mined, Produced, or Manufactured with Forced Labor in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Notably in this year’s strategy, the FLETF has identified new high priority sectors for enforcement – aluminum, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and seafood – for the first time since 2022.
The Department of Homeland Security, Chair of the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force (FLETF) released a summary of enforcement efforts since enactment of the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act. Highlighted in the fact sheet are the impacts the FLETF has made on Solar, PVC and Cotton supply chains, as well as a summary of the recent designation of New High Priority Sectors for Enforcement
The nine nuclear-armed states—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and Israel—continued to modernize their nuclear arsenals and several deployed new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapon systems in 2023, according to the most recent SIPRI Yearbook.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson announced his intention to renew the House Select Committee on the CCP for the 119th Congress, according to a Committee announcement. The 119th Congress will convene in January 2025.
The Information Systems Technical Advisory Committee (ISTAC) will meet on July 24, 2024, 9:00 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time. To join the conference, submit inquiries to Ms. Yvette Springer at Yvette.Springer@bis.doc.gov .
The Department of the Treasury, as Chair of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would expand CFIUS’s jurisdiction over certain transactions by foreign persons involving real estate in the United States. This proposed rule would add over 50 military installations, across 30 states, to the existing list of installations around which CFIUS has jurisdiction, including over land purchases.
Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson repeaded the Treasury's call for bankers to maintain correspondent relationships abroad, and reverse the wholesale cessation of such arrangements for administrative compliance expediency which has been taking place. "We share the concerns that Pacific Island countries are experiencing among the most serious declines in correspondent banking relationships in the world," he noted. "These terminations of correspondent banking relationships can be calamitous, given that many Pacific Island countries receive approximately 10 percent of their collective GDP in the form of personal remittances.
Following on the June 18 Indictments of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned a Mexico-based money launderer and China-based members of a money laundering organization with criminal links to the Sinaloa Cartel Monday.. The United States is working with Chinese authorities to target illicit financing networks, including those linked to the fentanyl trade. Chinese Money Laundering Organizations are now one of the key actors laundering money professionally in the United States and worldwide, and are rapidly becoming one of the most prominent money laundering threat actors facing the U.S. financial system.
The volume of world merchandise trade turned up in the first quarter of 2024 after remaining flat throughout 2023, according to the latest trade statistics released by the WTO. Merchandise trade …
The FCC proposes to prohibit recognition and participation in its equipment authorization program for any certification body or test lab directly or indirectly owned or controlled by an entity on the Covered List. The Covered List comprises entities identified as posing a national security risk. The FCC also plans to prevent reliance on any TCB or test lab with ownership ties to entities on this list.
The Treasury Department's Office of Investment Security formally published the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for the Outbound Investment Rule announced June 21st. Written comments must be received by August 4, 2024.
Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued its OFAC Guidance: Production Submission Standards, updating OFAC’s former data delivery standards. This guidance provides technical and general guidance to persons submitting material to OFAC and applies primarily to persons providing responses to administrative subpoenas, requests for information, disclosures, and especially for submissions that may entail voluminous documentation (e.g., more than 100 pages).
Two people were arrested Tuesday morning for shipping controlled avionics from New Jersey to the United Arab Emirates without having obtained the required license and authorization. The defendants obtained an ADIRU, a component that supplies air data and inertial reference information to pilots’ electronic flight instrument system displays and attempted to ship it to another company in the UAE.
A Florida man has been indicted for attempting to export scientific equipment from the United States into Russia without a license. Kirill Gordei, 34, a citizen of Belarus and permanent resident of the U,S, allegedly falsely claimed that he was shipping a Thermo Fisher Scientific Orbitrap Exploris GC 240 Mass Spectrometer to Uzbekistan when it was, in fact, destined for Russia.
A United Nations report released on Wednesday revealed that Chinese companies and academic institutions own the largest number of patents for generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI, from the last decade – six times more than the United States, which placed second.Not only does it make up for nearly 70 per cent of patents, with Tencent, Ping An Insurance and Baidu leading globally, but it has published the highest number of scientific articles on GenAI between 2010 and 2023.
The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) added six companies to the Entity list Tuesday, four for their involvement in training Chinese military pilots in NATO tactics. BIS also added two UAE- based entities to the Entity List because they repeatedly engaged in “dilatory or evasive conduct, including the provision of false, misleading, or incomplete information, during end-use checks.”