Akin Gump announced the official launch of its national security and global investigations team on March 13. The practice group will work on "cross-border criminal, civil administrative and congressional investigations and voluntary self-disclosures relating to potential sanctions, export control, anti-corruption and anti-money laundering laws and regulations," the firm said.
When the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network revises a rule implementing the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), it will aim to ensure the regulations are “appropriately tailored to advance the public interest,” a Treasury Department official told lawmakers last week.
A bipartisan group of nine lawmakers urged the State Department on March 12 to increase sanctions, including financial restrictions, on Bosnian Serb Republic President Milorad Dodik and his “enablers” for continuing to promote secession from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
CBP has updated a license code in the Automated Export System for shipments involving export licenses by partner government agencies that aren’t incorporated in AES, it said in a March 13 CSMS message. Exporters should use License Code OPA (Other Partnership Agency) to give CBP a “heads-up that some paper documentation is required by another Federal agency not accommodated in AES,” according to the agency, such as the Drug Enforcement Agency or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Licenses from the Bureau of Industry and Security, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the State Department, the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission “cannot be used with license type” OPA, CBP said in the CSMS message.
A State Department notice declaring that all agency efforts to control international trade now constitute a "foreign affairs function" of the U.S. under the Administrative Procedure Act will ultimately be subject to the discretion of the courts, trade lawyers told us.
Former U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan defended the Biden administration's final weeks of moves that imposed sanctions against Russia and export controls on China, saying they set up the current administration for success.
Denmark is considering new legislation that could punish EU sanctions violators by sentencing them to up to eight years in prison, an uptick from the current maximum four-month sentence, the country’s Ministry of Justice said this week. And if there are "aggravating circumstances," the ministry said, certain offenders could face up to eight years, according to an unofficial translation.
Two Democrats and two Republicans in the Senate asked the administration to press Canada on changing how it administers tariff rate quotas for U.S. dairy exports as it approaches a renegotiation.
Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, reintroduced a bill March 10 aimed at giving Congress more oversight over administration actions to ease sanctions on Iran.
The U.N. Security Council on March 11 updated the entries for 12 people on its ISIL (Da’esh) and al-Qaida sanctions list. The council updated some entries to indicate that they may have died, and it updated identifying information for the others.