ExxonMobil is requesting that a court vacate a $2 million penalty imposed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control for doing business with Rosneft, a Russian oil company, according to a brief filed Aug. 26 with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

The United Kingdom’s post-Brexit tariff plan may not be a viable long term option and may significantly damage certain U.K. farmers, companies and exporters, said Robert Chapman, a London-based trade lawyer with Mayer Brown.

Japan said it will allow “legitimate” exports to South Korea as it prepares today to remove the country from its list of trusted trading partners. During an Aug. 27 press conference, Hiroshige Seko, Japan’s minister of trade, economy and industry, repeated assertions that the move is not a “countermeasure” to any South Korean actions and is not an export embargo.

Violations of the Arms Export Control Act require knowledge that the unlicensed exports were unlawful, and not just that the exporter knew their general conduct was illegal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in an Aug. 20 decision. Vacating the conviction of a forwarder for Arms Export Control Act violations, the appeals court held that the lower court’s jury instructions were not specific enough and could have been misinterpreted to include knowledge of import violations in another country.

Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with some of the top stories for Aug. 19-23 in case they were missed.

The U.S. and Japan agreed to a trade deal that will see Japan buy more U.S. agricultural goods, including beef, pork, dairy and corn, the countries announced during the G-7 summit in France.

The Department of Finance Canada is deploying changes to antidumping regulations “to ensure that an appropriate level of anti-dumping duties can be applied to goods that are dumped into Canada,” it said in an Aug. 23 news release. “This will provide greater flexibility to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) to address situations where there may be distortions in the price of the goods in the country of export. It clarifies alternative methods to calculate the costs of production of the imported goods, in cases where the price of inputs is distorted because of purchases made between affiliated companies or because of a particular market situation.”

U.S. industry representatives criticized China’s Aug. 23 decision to impose retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. and called for the two sides to quickly reach a trade deal. The latest Chinese tariffs could lock U.S. companies out of China for “many years,” said Doug Barry, spokesman for the U.S.-China Business Council. Barry said U.S. companies are worried that China is finding other suppliers as the trade war continues, and the latest measures may only speed up the process. “More worrisome is the signal to everyone, everywhere, that the trade conflict is getting worse, not better,” Barry said. “So let’s not invest and let’s not buy.”

CBP is close to bringing industry on board to "go operational" with electronic manifest for export, said Jim Swanson, director of CBP’s Cargo and Security Controls Division, during the Aug. 21 Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee meeting in Buffalo, New York. Swanson said he has multiple meetings in the coming weeks with companies about using electronic manifest. CBP has been testing it internally for a while, Swanson said.

China’s Ministry of Commerce repeated claims that it will retaliate against higher U.S. tariffs, said it opposed new U.S. measures against Huawei and plans to make an announcement involving its so-called unreliable entity list “soon,” spokesman Gao Feng said at an Aug. 22 press conference, according to an unofficial translation of a transcript from the briefing.