The U.S. is holding off on imposing new sanctions against Russia because it believes those measures will undercut any chance of a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine “for the foreseeable future,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week, despite calls from the EU and others to continue strengthening sanctions against Moscow.
The U.K.'s $400,000 fine in July of a British management services firm for violating Russia sanctions (see 2507310042) shows that merely having a sanctions compliance program may not be enough to mitigate a fine, Steptoe said in a client alert.
The U.K. last week removed Alex Kande Mupompa from its sanctions regime targeting the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mupompa, a DRC official, was sanctioned for alleged human rights violations, including his ties to the "disproportionate use of force, violent repression and extrajudicial killings" by DRC security forces. The U.K. announcement came after an EU court in 2024 annulled Mupompa's designation, according to an unofficial translation.
The U.K., France and Germany will support snapback sanctions against Iran if the country doesn’t agree to safeguards around its nuclear program by the end of this month, the three European nations said last week.
The future effectiveness of U.S. export controls will depend on which technologies the government targets, how it collaborates with allies, and how well the U.S. is able to resource the Bureau of Industry and Security, said Navin Girishankar and Matt Borman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Citing national security and legal concerns, seven Democratic lawmakers called on the Trump administration Aug. 15 to reverse its decision to allow Nvidia and AMD to sell certain controlled computing chips to China in exchange for a portion of their sales revenue.
Applied Materials, the largest American semiconductor equipment supplier, is expecting a drop in its China sales due to uncertainty around U.S. export controls and its high volume of pending license applications, executives said last week.
President Donald Trump signed a new executive order Aug. 13 aimed at deregulating the commercial space sector, which it said will help make American space launch companies more competitive. The order doesn't explicitly mention the loosening of export or trade restrictions, but it directs the Commerce and Transportation departments, along with other government offices, to create a "streamlined process for authorizing novel space activities (missions not clearly or straightforwardly governed by existing regulatory frameworks) with the goal of enabling American space competitiveness and superiority in new space-based industries."
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and House Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar, R-Mich., called on the Bureau of Industry and Security Aug. 14 to return China’s Institute of Forensic Science to the BIS Entity List, citing the lab’s "continual and well-documented" human rights abuses.
The U.S. this week sanctioned Mexican cartels Carteles Unidos and Los Viagras along with seven people that it said work closely with the cartels and are linked to terrorism, drug trafficking and extortion.