The Bureau of Industry and Security dismissed appeals from a Turkish airline and a Russian tour company after both said they were wrongly implicated in a temporary denial order the agency renewed against a separate Russian airline in June.
Damen Shipyards Group, the Netherlands' largest shipbuilder, filed a lawsuit against the Dutch government for losses sustained due to the sanctions on Russia, a company spokesperson told us. Bloomberg first reported this week that the company filed suit at the Court of Rotterdam in May. The case is expected to proceed next year.
Companies should review existing and prospective agreements for potential liability under China's anti-foreign sanctions law, Evan Chuck of Crowell & Moring advised during a Practising Law Institute webinar on Sept. 26.
The Biden administration should sanction former Ecuador President Rafael Correa for his involvement in corruption and human rights violations, Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said in a Oct. 2 letter to the White House. They said Congress is “pursuing bipartisan legislative efforts to deepen bilateral relations with Ecuador, and Biden “should reinforce these bipartisan measures by immediately holding [Correa] accountable.” The lawmakers, led by Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the committee’s top Republican, also said Correa makes “frequent trips to meet with U.S.-sanctioned officials of the narco-terrorist regime in Venezuela.” The White House didn’t comment.
The U.S. this week sanctioned a China-based network of companies and people involved in manufacturing and distributing “ton quantities” of fentanyl, methamphetamine and MDMA precursors. The designations also target two entities and one person based in Canada.
Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case you missed them. You can find any article by searching for the title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
The EU has received assurances that Beijing will grant export licenses for shipments of gallium and germanium to European businesses despite the restrictions China placed on exports of the two metals in August (see 2307050018), European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said this week. Dombrovskis also said the bloc is looking to sanction additional Chinese firms that may be skirting restrictions against Russia and is hoping to ensure its upcoming supply chain due diligence regulations don’t impose excessive compliance burdens on EU companies.
LONDON -- The Bureau of Industry and Security is noticing a sharp uptick in low-level U.S. microelectronics exports to countries that weren’t involved in semiconductor-related shipments before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, said Liz Abraham, senior adviser for international policy at BIS. She said BIS is looking at creative ways to potentially restrict some of those shipments, even though many of them are designated under the Export Administration Regulations as EAR99 -- items that generally don’t require an export license.
A group of European countries not in the EU aligned with two recent sanctions decisions from the European Council, one under the Guinea-Bissau restrictions list and one pertaining to the situation in Iran.
The U.K. issued a General License Sept. 29 under its Russia sanctions regime to provide certainty that a credit or financial institution can return a payment to another such institution which has been processed by a sanctioned credit or financial institution at some point in the payment chain. The license applies when the sanctioned party acted as an original, correspondent or intermediary institution where the recipient institution and the institution that sent the payment are not designated parties, and the original account holder and the original intended recipient are not sanctioned parties. The license expires at the end of the day on Dec. 1.