BIS Issues Pakistan Export Control Guidance
The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security issued a guidance for exports, re-exports and transfers to Pakistan, covering license requirements for items subject to the Export Administration Regulations and best practices for screening Pakistani customers.
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BIS said it recently added Pakistani entities or companies related to Pakistan to its Entity List, including Pakistan-based Engineering and Commercial Services and Solutions Engineering, which were both involved in illegally supplying items to entities on the Entity List. BIS also added Techcare Services FZ LLC and UEC (Pvt.) Ltd. for trying to buy U.S.-origin goods destined for Pakistan’s “unsafeguarded nuclear program.”
The agency also discovered “schemes” to illegally export goods subject to the EAR to “nuclear- and missile-related entities” in Pakistan, BIS said, and detailed when specific licenses are needed for exports to Pakistan.
Companies should “conduct additional due diligence” when doing business with Pakistan, BIS said, including researching their customers. BIS cautioned that they should investigate customers who: place a “high-value order for sophisticated equipment,” claim to be a reseller or distributor, have no website or social media presence, have a similar address to an entity listing and make all shipping arrangements through a forwarding service.
BIS also said companies should always “assess the potential applications of your products” by considering their “potential dual-use” applications. “If your products are commonly used in the power generation industry and some of your customers are nuclear power plants, you should consider whether your items might be destined for a nuclear power plant in Pakistan, which may be subject to Entity List-based licensing requirements,” the guidance said.
The agency said companies on the Entity List have tried to buy several items subject to the EAR but not listed on the Commerce Control List, including “connectors,” “electromechanical relays,” “gas measurement equipment,” “global positioning satellite systems,” “power supplies,” “reflectometers” and vacuum pumps.
Automated screenings for companies on the Entity List “may not be sufficient to identify” certain entities, BIS said, and urged companies to manually review their compliance with export controls and U.S. sanctions. BIS also said to “file true, accurate, and complete export control information” because some “parties to an export transaction may be inadvertently misrepresented on [Electronic Export Information] filings due to differences between commercial document requirements and EEI requirements.”