The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security Regulations and Procedures Technical Advisory Committee met September 12th, with little news, but steady progress on the rulemaking front.

President Biden and General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong of the Communist Party of Vietnam met in early September and initiatied a "Comprehensive Strategic Partnership," a status Vietnam reserves for its closest partners, emphasizing peace, cooperation, and sustainable development. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam remains categorized as a "non-market economy," and is treated less favorably under US anti-dumping law.  Removal of this designation is a priority ask from Hanoi, although it hasn't materially slowed growth in exports to the US.

Denial of Export Privileges: Firearms to Mexico & Ecuador; Rebreathers to Libya

One of the two Florida men arrested this Spring in a scheme to launder funds for the fugitive "Gas King of Ukraine," through a Florida metals service center has entered a guilty plea. Sergey Karpushkin, a Belarusian citizen from Miami, was indicted and arrested for engaging in a $150 million scheme to violate U.S. sanctions against Russian oligarch Sergey Kurchenko and his two companies. Karpushkins plea acknowledged violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act ("IEEPA"), 50 U.S.C. § 1705; and other money laundering charges.

The US Export-Import Bank Board of Directors has approved the first-ever direct loan to support domestic manufacturing. The $4.7 million to Aquatech, a small, minority-owned business based in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, is the first transaction authorized under ExIm’s Make More in America Initiative.

President Biden has tapped Erik Woodhouse as his nominee to head the State Department’s Office of Sanctions Coordination. Mr. Woodhouse currently serves as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Counter Threat Finance and Sanctions in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs.

A group of Congressional Democrats are raising questions with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo over her department’s failure to release data on its approvals of assault weapons exports. …

Huawei's release of a phone called the Mate 60 Pro has the industrial security community atwitter, if we can still use that word.   The device boasts a processor fabricated at seven nanometers, a threshold of precision the allied export controls of chipmaking equipment were meant to thwart.   

OFAC Published Russian Harmful Foreign Activities Sanctions Regulations Web General License 13F   Transactions Involving the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the National Wealth Fund of the Russian Federation, and the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation

IMF staff partnered with eight Nordic and Baltic countries in a first-of-its-kind anti-money laundering technical assistance project,   They conclude that combatting money laundering is beyond the capacity of any single nation—and that countries must innovate together to find a solution. The regional report analyses selected aspects of the Nordic-Baltic region’s AML/CFT regimes. It focuses on key money-laundering threats resulting from a novel financial flows analysis (based on cross-border payments data), vulnerabilities related to AML/CFT supervision of the banking sector and crypto asset service providers and the potential impact of financial integrity failures on financial stability.

Representatives Gregory Meeks, Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Andy Barr (R-KY), Vice Chair of the House India Caucus,introduced legislation to loosen export restrictions of high-performance computing equipment to India.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) revealed a Financial Trend Analysis (FTA) concerning potential evasion of Russia-related export controls, based on Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) reports amounting to nearly $1 billion in suspicious activity. BIS utilizes data from BSA reports to instigate new investigations and support ongoing ones.

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party will hold a hearing on September 12th at 8:30 a.m., at Peterson Hall at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, NY. The committee is also expected to host a tabletop war game for Wall Street executives to illustrate a PRC invation of Taiwan.   

The European Council sanctioned six individuals responsible for serious human rights violations in the Russian Federation and in the territories of Ukraine that Russia has temporarily occupied, including violations of freedom of opinion and expression. The individuals listed include prosecutors and judges active in courts established by Russia’s occupying force in illegally annexed Crimea. as well as two members of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) that either took part in torturing journalist Vladyslav Yesypenko, or conducted the investigations in his case, and those of members of the Crimean Tatar community, and of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Crimea.

Deputies of the REPO Task Force met in Washington to enhance sanctions enforcement efforts and bolster ongoing oligarch asset forfeiture initiatives.  Participants from Australia, Canada, …

The recently unveiled United States Strategy on Countering Corruption delineates an ambitious approach to address corruption through a series of well-defined measures. This initiative, detailed under five distinct pillars, seeks to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of existing government frameworks, both within and outside U.S borders. To curb corruption and its deleterious effects, the U.S. Government will organize its efforts around five mutually reinforcing pillars of work: 1.  Modernizing, coordinating, and resourcing U.S. Government efforts to fight corruption;  2. Curbing illicit finance; 3. Holding corrupt actors accountable; 4. Preserving and strengthening the multilateral anti-corruption architecture; and, 5. Improving diplomatic engagement and leveraging foreign assistance resources to advance policy goals.

Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) imposed a civil penalty of $48,750 against Pratt & Whitney's aftermarket parts division to resolve 13 violations of the antiboycott provisions of the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) (antiboycott regulations) PWCS voluntarily disclosed the conduct to BIS, cooperated with the investigation by BIS’s Office of Antiboycott Compliance (OAC), and took remedial measures after discovering the conduct at issue, all of which resulted in a significant reduction in penalty.

Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned a Sudanese Military Leader for his command of  an entity whose members have engaged in acts of violence and human rights abuses, including the massacre of civilians, ethnic killings, and use of sexual violence. Meanwhile, in Stockholm, trial has begun for two senior executives of Lundin Oil, responsible for engaging the Sudanese Armed Forces to ensure security for their production interests in South Sudan in between 1997 and 2003.

Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) announced the removal of the motor yacht Flying Dragon from the list of Specially Designated Nationals and blocked Persons.

As of August 2023, EXIM continued to monitor a prior years's transaction of two satellites for the government of Mexico, according to a GAO audit of EXIM's compliance financing dual-use items. The first satellite, launched in December 2012, was a fixed-service satellite that went live in February 2013. The second, a mobile-service satellite, launched in October 2015 and became operational that December. The board last approved a new dual-use transaction in fiscal year 2012.