July / August 2024 Export Practitioner

A Florida man was charged  with conspiring and acting as an agent of the PRC without notification to the Attorney General. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.  From as early as 2012, Peng Li, 59 allegedly served as a cooperative contact working at the direction of officers of the Ministry of State Security to obtain information of interest to the PRC government.

A grand jury in Kansas City, Kansas, returned an indictment on Wednesday charging a fugitive North Korean national for his involvement in a conspiracy to hack and extort U.S. hospitals and other health care providers, launder the ransom proceeds, and then use these proceeds to fund additional computer intrusions into defense, technology, and government entities worldwide. Rim Jong Hyok worked for North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), a military intelligence agency, and participated in the conspiracy to target and hack computer networks of U.S. hospitals and other health care providers, encrypt their electronic files, extort a ransom payment from them, launder those payments, and use the laundered proceeds to hack targets of interest to the North Korean regime.

An Illinois woman was sentenced to 24 months in federal prison for conspiring to unlawfully export to Russia defense articles – including thermal imaging riflescopes and night-vision goggles – without a license in violation of the Arms Export Control Act. To conceal her unlawful activities, when Shifrin exported the defense articles to Russia, she listed fictitious sender names and addresses on the packages containing the defense articles, falsely identified the items in the packages as non-export-controlled items such as clothing, and concealed the defense articles in other items such as toolkits and kitchen appliances.

Legislation to ban Chinese-made connected vehicles from US military bases and other federal installations was introduced yesterday by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). The Countering Adversary Reconnaissance (CAR) Act would bar Chinese connected vehicles from much of the U.S., making it impractical and unprofitable to import them in the first place. The Countering Adversary …

A joint resolution of Congress to void and nullify the Commerce Department's “Revision of Firearms License Requirements” (89 Fed. Reg. 34680) passed out of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs July 11 on a vote of 24 to 23. Sponsored by Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn), the motion is a companion to his“Stop the Bureaucratic Ineptitude Shuttering Respectable and Upstanding Lawful Exporters Act” or the “Stop the BIS Rule Act” (HR 8208) introduced in May.

In his weekly news confwerence, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lin Jian reiterated China's refusal to engage in nuclear nonproliferation discussions in light of arms sales to Taipei.    "This has seriously compromised the political atmosphere for continuing the arms control consultations. Consequently, the Chinese side has decided to hold off discussion with the US on a new round of consultations on arms control and non-proliferation," he stated.

The State Department issued a Statement of Concern Tuesday focused on certain minerals supply chains from Rwanda and eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The statement clarifies the specific risks associated with manufacturing products using minerals extracted, transported or exported from eastern DRC, through Rwanda and Uganda, according to State.

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response announced Tuesday that they are conducting a comprehensive assessment of the US Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient industrial base to gain an understanding of the supply chain network. The resulting information will allow the federal government to more accurately plan and develop funding strategies to help ensure the availability and security of the API supply chain and to raise awareness of current limited domestic manufacturing capabilities, among other potential issues, according to BIS.

The Department of Homeland Security, Chair of the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force (FLETF) released a summary of enforcement efforts since enactment of the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act. Highlighted in the fact sheet are the impacts the FLETF has made on Solar, PVC and Cotton supply chains, as well as a summary of the recent designation of New High Priority Sectors for Enforcement

On July 18, 2024, the Bureau of Industry and Security published an interim final rule that revised the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). That rule inadvertently revised language related to recent changes to the Entity List. This document corrects the inadvertent revisions introduced in the July 18, 2024, rule.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) and Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) are calling on the Commerce Department to beef up its new rule on firearms license requirements in order to prevent US weapons exports from contributing to violence and killings across the globe. The lawmakers are responding to an interim final rule issued in April by Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which strengthened Commerce’s exports licensing requirements and regulations. But there are still critical weaknesses to the rule, the lawmakers said in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

The Commerce Department published a Final Rule redesignating regulations governing  the review of certain transactions involving information and communications technology and services (ICTS) …

Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) published guidance outlining the different actions that BIS takes to inform industry and academia about parties – beyond those identified on public screening lists like the Entity List – that present risks of diversion of items subject to BIS export controls to countries or entities of concern. Thew guidance also contains a new recommended best practice asking that exporters, reexporters, and transferors of Common High Priority List (CHPL) items screen transaction parties using online resources made newly available by the Trade Integrity Project (TIP).

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS)  added six companies to the Entity list Tuesday, four for their involvement in training Chinese military pilots in NATO tactics. BIS also added two UAE- based entities to the Entity List because they repeatedly engaged in “dilatory or evasive conduct, including the provision of false, misleading, or incomplete information, during end-use checks.”