Exporters Guizhou Tyre Co. and Aeolus Tyre Co. said in a June 20 reply brief that the U.S. ignored the manner in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said presumptions operate under the Federal Rules of Evidence (Guizhou Tyre Co. v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 23-2163).
Adam Safwat, a former deputy chief of DOJ's fraud section, has joined Foley Hoag as a partner in the white collar crime and government investigations practice, the firm announced. Safwat will be based in Washington, D.C., and will focus on Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations, sanctions, political corruption and financial fraud, the firm said. Safwat most recently was a partner at Nelson Mullins.
The EU General Court on June 19 rejected Russian businessperson Igor Rotenberg's bid to be removed from the EU's Russian sanctions list. Rotenberg was sanctioned for holding leadership positions in Russian companies SGM, Gazprom Drilling and Mostotrest and for his association with his father, oligarch Arkady Rotenberg, and with President Vladimir Putin.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control urged a federal court late last month to dismiss the sole remaining claim in a lawsuit challenging the agency’s sanctioning of two former Afghan government officials for corruption.
Akin Gump attorneys elected Abid Qureshi and Daniel Walsh as co-chairs of the firm, starting their run on April 1, 2025, the firm announced. The pair will replace Kim Koopersmith, who has held the chair spot since 2013. Qureshi's portfolio centers on financial restricting, while Walsh's practice centers on international and U.S. public and private debt and equity acquisitions, Akin said. Akin's international trade practice advises clients on customs, antidumping and countervailing duty complaints, export controls, economic sanctions, World Trade Organization dispute resolution and more.
The Supreme Court of the Netherlands last week sustained the conviction of a person (name redacted) for violating the nation's sanctions laws, according to an unofficial translation. The court found that the accused's transfer of money to the person's brother, who's a fighter for ISIS in Syria, amounted to the transfer of funds to a terrorist organization, in violation of Dutch sanctions laws.
The Customs Rulings Online Search System (CROSS) was updated June 5-14 with the following headquarters rulings (ruling revocations and modifications will be detailed elsewhere in a separate article as they are announced in the Customs Bulletin):
CBP said in a customs ruling earlier this month that luxury goods sold between a related European exporter and U.S. importer weren't subject to restrictions on their use that barred the use of the transaction method. In addition, CBP excluded service fees between the companies from the actual price of the goods since the fees didn't pertain to the goods' importation, and the agency found that the relationship between the parties didn't preclude the use of the transaction value method to appraise the value of the goods.
The Commerce Department reconsidered on remand its model match hierarchy in the antidumping duty investigation on superabsorbent polymers (SAP) from South Korea, opting to go with the hierarchy made of centrifugal retention capacity "in 6 g/g increments" it used in the investigation's preliminary determination but not in the final decision (The Ad Hoc Coalition of American SAP Producers v. United States, CIT # 23-00010).
The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York: