Canada announced then later rescinded retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. after both sides reached an agreement to delay new tariffs this week.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he officially brought back the Cuba Restricted List on Jan. 31, part of an effort by the Trump administration to reverse last-minute moves by President Joe Biden that removed certain sanctions against the country (see 2501220008 and 2501170021). The U.S. also added an entity to the list: Orbit, S.A., which the State Department said is a remittance-processing company with ties to the Cuban military. The Cuba Restricted List includes entities that are subject to certain financial restrictions because of their ties to the Cuban government.
Companies should expect Trump administration to take an increasingly aggressive stance on China-related inbound and outbound investment restrictions, especially because of the makeup of President Donald Trump’s team and key Cabinet officials, a former Treasury Department official and trade consultant said.
U.S. export controls are increasingly trending toward unilateral, extraterritorial restrictions as opposed to multilateral ones, and that could continue under the administration of President Donald Trump, said Jeannette Chu, vice president for national security policy at the National Foreign Trade Council.
A group of 13 House Democrats urged the Trump administration Jan. 31 not to ease sanctions on Venezuela as part of a deal to return Venezuelans living in the U.S. to their home country.
President Donald Trump’s efforts to slash the federal workforce are unlikely to target the Bureau of Industry and Security, which is already dealing with employee shortages as it carries out U.S. export control policy, a former senior BIS official said.
The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network this week rescinded two alerts that warned banks about transactions that may have been funding “Israeli extremist settler violence” in violation of U.S. sanctions (see 2402010053). The alerts had asked banks and other financial institutions to submit suspicious activity reports to FinCEN if they believed a transaction may have been tied to West Bank violence. The move came days after the Office of Foreign Assets Control, under the direction of President Donald Trump, officially removed sanctions from all people and entities designated under a Biden-era sanctions authority that had targeted violent Israeli settlers and organizations in the region (see 2501240011).
European Parliament members this week probed the EU’s new trade commissioner about how he’s handling President Donald Trump’s tariff threats, with some members calling on the EU to prepare for retaliation.
The leaders of the House Select Committee on China urged the Trump administration Jan. 30 to tighten export controls on computing chips that could enable China’s development of artificial intelligence.
The EU is proposing new tariffs on certain imports of agricultural products and nitrogen-based fertilizers from Russia and Belarus, part of a push to reduce dependencies on products from the two countries. The potential tariffs would target the “15% of agricultural imports from Russia in 2023 that had not yet been subject to increased tariffs,” the European Commission said. “Once adopted by the European Parliament and the Council, all agricultural imports from Russia would be the subject of EU tariffs.”