The Office of Foreign Assets Control this week sanctioned six companies based in mainland China and Hong Kong that have helped to supply drone parts to sanctioned Iranian firms. OFAC said the companies “facilitate the purchase and shipment of key unmanned aerial vehicle components to Pishtazan Kavosh Gostar Boshra, sanctioned in 2019, and its subsidiary Narin Sepehr Mobin Isatis, which supply Iran’s UAV and ballistic missile programs.
Ray Hunt, an Alabama resident and business owner, was sentenced this week to five years in prison after pleading guilty in July to conspiring to illegally export U.S.-origin goods to Iran, DOJ announced. The agency said Hunt conspired to ship parts used in the oil and gas industry to Iran and submitted false export information to the U.S. government (see 2211300011). He worked around U.S. restrictions by using third-party transshipment companies in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, routing payments through UAE banks, and lying to shipping companies about how much the exports were worth to stop them from filing export information in the Automated Export System.
The U.N. Security Council last week removed Lionel Dumont from its ISIL (Da’esh) and al-Qaida sanctions list. Dumont, a French national, was originally sanctioned for his ties to terrorism. The U.N. didn’t release more information.
The Census Bureau is revising error message 26C in the Automated Export System, which alerts users when the U.S. Principal Party in Interest Address State Code and the U.S. State of Origin Code don’t match, the agency said in a Feb. 20 email to industry.
The U.S. should gradually ease sanctions on Syria to help the war-torn country rebuild, but the lifting of many of those restrictions should be linked to whether Syria’s new leaders live up to their promise to break from their extremist past, two researchers told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Feb. 13.
The U.K. extended the antidumping and countervailing duties on folding e-bikes from China for another five years, so they are applied until January 2029, the Department for International Trade announced. The department chose to extend the duties only on folding e-bikes, despite the original duties applying to all e-bikes from China. The antidumping duties range from 10.3% to 70.1%, and include a 62.1% margin for all non-individually examined exporters. The countervailing duties range from 3.9% to 17.2%, and include a 17.2% rate for all non-individually examined exporters.
After losing a USMCA dispute panel ruling on its measures to phase out genetically modified corn and crops treated with the herbicide glyphosate, Mexico announced this week it is repealing the decrees that addressed those issues.
U.S. export controls are increasingly trending toward unilateral, extraterritorial restrictions as opposed to multilateral ones, and that could continue under the administration of President Donald Trump, said Jeannette Chu, vice president for national security policy at the National Foreign Trade Council.
The U.S. and Vietnam agreed to resolve a long-running dispute on U.S. antidumping duty proceedings on fish fillets from Vietnam. The dispute was originally brought in 2018 to challenge the proceedings as being in violation of the WTO antidumping agreement. In particular, Vietnam challenged the U.S. government's imposition of AD cash deposit requirements in the fifth, sixth and seventh reviews of the AD order, covering entries in 2007-2010. Vietnam claimed that the U.S, should have revoked the order following the seventh review and that the U.S. unlawfully used a country-wide AD rate based on adverse facts available against respondents that were not individually investigated.
Outgoing Bureau of Industry and Security Undersecretary Alan Estevez said he would advise his successor to continue coordinating export controls with allies and to not immediately turn to extraterritorial restrictions, such as the foreign direct product rule.