A new law aimed at cutting off funding for Hamas requires the Biden administration to submit a key report to Congress by Oct. 21, according to a spokesperson for Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., who proposed the legislation.
An upcoming supply chain summit hosted by the Commerce Department and the Council on Foreign Relations will bring together industry and government leaders to discuss ways to improve supply chain resilience.
A decrease last year in filings with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. is continuing into 2024, Latham & Watkins said in an Aug. 2 client alert.
The Bureau of Industry and Security promoted Tracy Patts to be the agency’s assistant director of the International Operations Division within the Office of Enforcement Analysis, Patts announced on LinkedIn this week. Patts has been at BIS since 2010 and mostly worked as a senior export policy analyst.
A Massachusetts financial services firm agreed to pay a nearly $7.5 million penalty after the Office of Foreign Assets Control accused its subsidiary of revising dates on invoices to skirt certain financial restrictions on dealings in new Russia-related debt. OFAC said the company’s 38 violations of the Ukraine-/Russia-Related Sanctions Regulations involved more than $1.2 million worth of invoices for companies owned by Russia’s Sberbank and VTB Bank.
The Federal Maritime Commission this week released its final rule on unreasonable carrier conduct, the last step in the FMC’s nearly two-year campaign of crafting regulations to address ocean carriers that unfairly refuse vessel or cargo space to shippers.
The Bureau of Industry and Security issued a rule last week to finalize changes to its Defense Priorities and Allocations System regulation with “minor technical amendments” from the proposed version BIS released in February. The rule, effective Aug. 21, will clarify the “existing standards and procedures” by which BIS may provide special priorities assistance, providing “transparency and differentiation between other departments’ priorities” and the Commerce Department’s jurisdiction. Other changes make “technical edits to reflect certain non-substantive updates since the DPAS regulation was last amended in 2014.”
CBP is making progress on rules to eventually mandate electronic export manifest (EEM) for air, vessel and rail cargo and is still on track to deploy a truck EEM portal later this year, the agency said ahead of the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee’s June 26 meeting. COAC also issued one recommendation related to accelerated payments for certain drawback entries.
A new rule that would impose a three-day deadline for certain responses to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. was unanimously criticized by several law firms, an industry group and the Chinese government, which said such a time frame doesn’t take into account the complex, time-consuming discussions companies must have when dealing with CFIUS. Some commenters also asked the committee to nix a proposed change that would raise the maximum penalty for violations from $250,000 per violation to $5 million, saying most violations are accidental, and the increase could rattle the “confidence” of foreign investors.
Detention and demurrage billings appear to have returned to pre-pandemic levels after spiking during the last few years, said Jason Guthrie, an official with the Federal Maritime Commission's Bureau of Trade Analysis.