American defense firm RTX will pay close to $1 billion to resolve allegations that it tried to defraud the U.S. government and committed violations of defense export control regulations and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, DOJ and the SEC said Oct. 16. The company agreed to enter into two deferred prosecution agreements to settle the claims, which included Raytheon’s alleged failure to report bribes in export licensing applications and its submission of false information to the U.S. as part of multiple foreign military defense contracts.
U.S. in-house attorneys need to be more vigilant than ever when investigating possible export control violations, lawyers said this week, adding that the risks of a possible civil or criminal penalty for a subpar internal investigation, or for not disclosing a violation quickly enough, are rising.
Correction: Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said at an April 17 Senate Finance Committee hearing on the administration's trade agenda that a whistleblower found “unsanitary conditions and rampant labor abuses” in the Indian shrimp industry, asking whether CBP would take action (see 2404170074).
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai gave testimony April 17 to the Senate Finance Committee regarding President Joe Biden’s 2024 trade policy agenda. She touched mainly on trade deal enforcement, U.S. exporters’ access to new markets and the USTR’s new stance on digital trade, though she also discussed issues such as forced labor and the upcoming legislation on the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program.
DOJ officials said they have seen a rise in voluntary self-disclosures in recent months, including for possible violations of export controls and sanctions. They also stressed that the agency is continuing to double down on its enforcement resources, including by hiring more prosecutors and starting a new whistleblower initiative to better incentivize tips about corporate wrongdoing.
The European Council and Parliament reached a deal on a new set of rules to ban imports suspected of being made with forced labor, including how the ban will be enforced and how the bloc will investigate and penalize violations.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Feb. 26 said it won't review whether whistleblower Brutus Trading should've been granted a hearing by a lower court in its case accusing U.K.-based Standard Chartered Bank of violating sanctions against Iran.
The Treasury Department has been too slow to propose regulations for a congressionally mandated sanctions whistleblower program, a group of bipartisan senators said this week, calling the agency’s lack of progress “unacceptable.”
Electronics distribution company Broad Tech System and its president and owner, Tao Jiang of Riverside, California, pleaded guilty Jan. 11 to participating in a conspiracy to illegally ship chemicals made or distributed by a Rhode Island-based company to a Chinese firm with ties to the Chinese military, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Rhode Island announced. Jiang and Broad Tech admitted to violating the Export Control Act and conspiring to commit money laundering.
The European Commission is urging anyone with information on Russia- or Belarus-related sanctions evasion to submit tips under its online EU sanctions whistleblower tool (see 2203080030). The online tool allows whistleblowers to submit reports anonymously, the bloc said in a Jan. 14 post on the social media platform X.