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.
Compliance departments need to be increasingly “creative” to catch goods or transactions that may be tied to Russian sanctions evasion, an industry official and former Treasury Department official said this week, especially as the U.S. and its allies ramp up enforcement. They also said compliance is growing more complex, particularly for financial institutions, which must meet expanding government expectations outlined in joint alerts recently published by the Commerce and Treasury departments.
Robert Broadbent, former acting associate general counsel for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Office of General Counsel, has joined Womble Bond as a partner in its Government Contracts and Cross-Border Trade practice. Based in the Charlottesville, Virginia, office, Broadbent will focus on "international trade and national security matters," including sanctions compliance, export control matters, foreign investment and security reviews, and trade agreement and foreign market access strategies, the firm said.
China is not convinced that the U.S. is only trying to derisk, not decouple, from China’s economy, said Ryan Hass, a former National Security Council official. He said Beijing is wary of the growing number of U.S. sanctions and trade restrictions and doesn’t believe the Biden administration is acting in “good faith,” which risks further worsening tensions.
Hong Kong-based apparel company Chagji Esquel Textile (CJE) and the Commerce Department filed a joint stipulation of dismissal on Aug. 11 in CJE's suit challenging its placement on the Entity List. The parties most recently filed a joint status report in June as they discussed the conditions related to the End-User Review Committee's July 2021 decision to drop the company from the Entity List (Changji Esquel Textile Co. v. Gina M. Raimondo, D.D.C. # 21-01798).
The Commerce, State and Labor departments issued an updated South Sudan business advisory this week to highlight the risks U.S. companies, investors and others in the country are facing, particularly involving state-owned companies, which may have ties to human rights abuses or corruption. The advisory, updated from guidance issued last year (see 2205230062), comes months after the country saw an increase in fighting between two Sudanese military forces (see 2305040037).
President Joe Biden this week extended a national emergency that authorizes certain export control regulations, the White House said. Biden renewed the emergency for one year beyond Aug. 17.
The U.S. removed sanctions from two former board members of a Russian state-owned bank after both argued they didn’t meet the criteria for placement on the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals List. The sanctions removals, made by the Office of Foreign Assets Control late last month, came after Russian nationals Elena Titova and Andrey Golikov, in separate complaints, sued the U.S. government over their designations, accusing it of sanctioning them on “no factual basis” and “unnecessarily” delaying delisting decisions.
China's Ministry of Commerce on Aug. 11 released a report covering "WTO Compliance of the United States." The report says China is concerned about U.S. policies and how they affect the World Trade Organization's rules-based trading system. A spokesperson for the ministry said China is using the report to call on the U.S. to abide by its commitments to the trade body, according to an unofficial translation.
A group of European countries not in the EU aligned with recent sanctions moves from the European Council regarding Iran's support for Russia's war in Ukraine, serious human rights abuses and the situation in Myanmar.