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:
The EU General Court on June 12 rejected Russian investment fund VEB.RF's application to be removed from the bloc's Russia sanctions regime, according to an unofficial translation. The European Council sanctioned the financial institution for helping undermine the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine and providing material support to "Russian decision-makers responsible for the annexation of Crimea or the destabilization of Eastern Ukraine."
The EU General Court on June 12 rejected Syrian businessman Issam Shammout's challenge to his designation under the bloc's Syria sanctions regime. Shammout, an executive for airline company Cham Wings Airlines and the Shammout Group, was sanctioned due to his position as a "leading businessperson operating in Syria."
Sergey Nefedov of Anchorage and Mark Shumovich of Bellevue, Washington, were charged June 11 with conducting a scheme to illegally export nearly $500,000 worth of snowmobilers and associated parts from the U.S. to Russia, DOJ announced.
A Spanish aluminum exporter argued June 11 that the Commerce Department is unlawfully restricting its statutory requirement to consider levels of trade when calculating normal value by requiring there be “substantial differences,” rather than plain “differences,” in those levels to trigger that analysis (Compania Valencia De Aluminio Baux, S.L.U. v. U.S., CIT # 23-00259).