The Bureau of Industry and Security plans later this month to add 30 companies and remove 17 others from its boycott requester list, a list of entities that have asked other companies to boycott goods from certain countries in violation of the Export Administration Regulations (see 2412300003). The change will bring the total number of companies on the list to 165, a Commerce Department official said at the BIS annual update conference this week. The official said the list has “driven foreign parties to change their behavior by” convincing them to eliminate boycott language from their business documents.

The Bureau of Industry and Security this week updated its website with a new page that lists all past BIS-related rules and notices published in the Federal Register; new tools to search the Commerce Control List; and more, a Commerce Department official said at the agency’s annual update conference. The official said the updates are the “first phase of our ongoing enhancement and migration efforts to transition information from the” old BIS website to the new one (see 2312040016).

The U.S. filed a civil forfeiture complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on March 18 against an aircraft that was allegedly smuggled from the U.S. and operated to benefit Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his representatives in Venezuela, in violation of U.S. sanctions and export controls. The aircraft, a Dassault Falcon 900 EX plane with tail number T7-ESPRT, was seized last year in the Dominican Republic at the request of the U.S., DOJ said.

The Bureau of Industry and Security is considering expanding its statute of limitations for certain export control violations, a Commerce Department official said.

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., announced March 17 that he has reintroduced a bill to require the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. to review agricultural land purchases by certain foreign entities, including those from China and Russia. The Security and Oversight for International Landholdings Act also would broaden disclosure requirements for foreign purchases of U.S. farmland. The bill, which Lankford originally introduced in the last Congress, was referred to the Senate Agriculture Committee.

The U.K. made several changes to its sanctions list this week for entries involving Russia and Belarus.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control this week finalized a rule to extend the agency’s sanctions-related recordkeeping requirements from five years to 10 years, aligning those rules with a similar expansion of the statute of limitations for civil and criminal violations of U.S. sanctions (see 2407220022 and 2404290071). The changes, outlined in an interim final rule published in September (see 2409110017), take effect March 21.

The U.S. government’s recently revised policy guidance for missile technology exports gives the Bureau of Industry and Security more flexibility to approve export licenses to support space launch vehicle (SLV) programs, a Commerce Department official said March 19.

The Bureau of Industry and Security is hoping to publish new guidance to clarify due diligence expectations for companies subject to the agency’s recent semiconductor-related export control rules, Commerce Department officials said this week. They also said the agency is hoping to expand its list of approved designers that will benefit from some licensing carve-outs for certain chip exports.

Paul Newman, former chief of the Census Bureau's Trade Data Collection Branch, recently retired from government, a Commerce Department official said during an annual Bureau of Industry and Security conference this week.