Of all the outstanding trade policy options -- new trade promotion authority, requiring Section 301 exclusions, revisions to antidumping law and a customs modernization law -- the head of government relations at Flexport said he thinks customs modernization is the most likely to pass. "I think we are coming on the cusp of something," Darien Flowers said, and said he thinks a bill will be enacted before 2025. Flowers once worked for Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who is leading the bill, though more recently he served on the minority staff of the Senate Commerce Committee.
The Bureau of Industry and Security's new administrative enforcement policies, including higher penalties for more serious violations, hasn’t led to a significant rise or fall in voluntary self-disclosures so far, said Matthew Axelrod, the agency’s top export enforcement official. Axelrod, speaking during a Nov. 14 event hosted by the Society for International Affairs, said BIS received 150 new VSDs since the policy change in June (see 2206300069), which he said was about the same number it received during the same time period each of the last two years.
The Office of Foreign Asset Control’s redesignation of Tornado Cash last week (see 2211080050) may have been aimed at bolstering the agency’s legal standing against the virtual currency mixer, according to a Nov. 9 report from MoneyLaundering.com, a news site operated by the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists.
Climate goals cannot be reached without taking into account the role of international trade, World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said in a Nov. 8 speech at an event with world leaders at the COP27 climate summit. In her speech, Okonjo-Iweala marked the publication of the World Trade Report, which lays out paths for governments to use trade to support national action plans for grappling with climate change, the WTO said. Examples of this trade action include lowering trade barriers for environmental goods and services, boosting cooperation on carbon measurement and verification, and shifting the WTO's Aid-for-Trade initiative to an investment program that expands sustainable trade opportunities in developing nations.
U.S. sanctions have “abjectly failed” to stop North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs and instead have allowed the regime’s weapons efforts to grow stronger, Reuters said in a Nov. 4 analysis. U.S. policymakers can now only “pick through the wreckage and seek to determine what went wrong,” the analysis said. "We've had a policy failure. It's a generational policy failure," Joseph DeThomas, a former U.S. official in the Clinton and Obama administrations who worked on North Korea and Iran sanctions, told Reuters. A senior U.S. administration official agreed that sanctions have failed to stop North Korea’s missile programs but told Reuters that “if the sanctions didn't exist, (North Korea) would be much, much further along, and much more of a threat to its neighbors to the region and to the world."
A U.S. hardware supplier said it may have violated U.S. export controls by selling to a Chinese foundry on the Entity List. MaxLinear, which sells highly integrated radio-frequency analog and mixed-signal semiconductor products, disclosed it submitted an "initial notification" of voluntary self-disclosure to the Bureau of Industry and Security in October and its sale may have violated the Export Administration Regulations because it never obtained a license.
DOJ's recent moves charging 11 individuals and various corporate entities for their roles in schemes to evade U.S. sanctions and export controls on Russia signal the government's continuing efforts to "aggressively enforce" restrictions on Russia, law firm Paul Weiss said in an analysis posted online Oct. 26. As a result, multilateral corporations with international supply chains need to ramp up compliance measures and be aware that international cooperation has expanded the reach of U.S. sanctions enforcement, the firm said.
Six Republican and four Democratic senators are asking U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai if she is meeting the legal requirement to consult with Congress before the U.S. commits to an intellectual property waiver related to the pandemic, a topic of discussion at the World Trade Organization.
The Federal Maritime Commission should exclude non-vessel-operating common carriers (NVOCC) from the scope of a rule that could define a set of factors the commission will consider when determining whether a carrier is violating certain shipping regulations, the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America said. The group stressed that it supports the rule if it helps to hold ocean common carriers accountable, including in situations in which they unfairly refuse space to U.S. exporters.
The failures of Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson and Korea Telecommunications Corporation (KT) provide poignant lessons on how to beef up protection against corruption risks, particularly within the telecommunications sector, lawyers at Hogan Lovells said in an analysis posted on the firm's website Oct. 11. The sector "is particularly vulnerable to corruption," meaning compliance functions must look to "double down on their efforts to ensure that robust and efficient processes" are implemented and stress-tested, the post said.