More than six months into President Donald Trump’s second term, the new administration’s plan for export controls on both semiconductors and chip manufacturing equipment remains unclear, industry officials and a congressional adviser said last week. They all said they hope any new controls are calibrated with allies.
Information collected under the Export Control Reform Act is “presumptively withheld” from Freedom of Information Act requests, the U.S. said July 14 in a case involving the disclosure of documents related to an addition to the Entity List (Husch Blackwell v. Department of Commerce, D.D.C. # 1:24-02733).
Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on South and Central Asia, introduced a bill July 17 that would require the Bureau of Industry and Security to increase the number of export control officers stationed in foreign countries to at least 20, up from 11 today.
Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, a Russian public research university, has launched a two-year master's program focused on mitigating and navigating international sanctions, the Moscow Times reported. The program is described as the first of its kind in Russia, and it aims to train students about how to "identify and assess the risks of sanctions and other measures imposed by supervisory authorities on companies." The program, which is reportedly not funded by the Russian government, costs about 490,000 rubles, or $6,260, annually, with 20 seats reserved for Russian citizens and two for international students.
The State Department is maintaining the status of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyiba as a foreign terrorist organization and is adding several aliases to both its FTO designation and its Specially Designated Global Terrorist designation, the agency said in notices released this week. The new aliases are: The Resistance Front, TRF, Kashmir Resistance Front and Kashmir Resistance. The designations subject the group to strict sanctions, financial reporting requirements and other restrictions.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control this week sanctioned six key leaders and affiliates of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuela-based criminal group that the U.S. labeled a Specially Designated Global Terrorist and Foreign Terrorist Organization in February (see 2502200019 and 2502200019). The designations target Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, also known as Nino Guerrero, the head of Tren de Aragua, along with co-founder Yohan Jose Romero and senior officials Josue Angel Santana Pena, Wilmer Jose Perez Castillo and Felix Anner Castillo Rondon. OFAC also sanctioned Guerrero Flores' wife, Wendy Marbelys Rios Gomez, for her ties to money laundering, terrorism and terrorist financing, the agency said, adding that it believes she has "enriched herself through profits" from Tren de Aragua.
A bill to mandate location-tracking mechanisms for exports of advanced chips was panned this week by technology policy experts who said the requirement would be tricky to implement and could push foreign customers to stop trusting American-made semiconductors. They also said Congress should be more focused on boosting the Bureau of Industry and Security budget to help the agency step up enforcement.
The State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls this week released its notifications to Congress of recently proposed export licenses. The notifications, which cover licenses submitted from January through March, include exports to Germany, Ukraine, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, the U.K., Denmark, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
Congress should ask the Trump administration several key questions as part of its oversight of the Treasury Department’s new program restricting outbound investment, two investment security experts told the House Financial Services national security subcommittee July 16.
The Council of the European Union on July 15 sanctioned Russian individuals and entities for committing human rights abuses and engaging in destabilizing actions abroad through foreign information manipulation.