The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned four people involved in a South African corruption network, Treasury said in an Oct. 10 press release. The network “leveraged overpayments on government contracts, bribery, and other corrupt acts” to fund political payments to control government actions, Treasury said. The measures include sanctions on Ajay Gupta, Atul Gupta, Rajesh Gupta and Salim Essa.

Business and labor leaders and government insider panelists agreed that the U.S.-China trade war will be difficult to unravel, but disagreed on how quickly Democrats could -- or should -- resolve outstanding issues on the NAFTA rewrite. The trade panel Oct. 10, hosted by Fiscal Note, included Clete Willems, former White House deputy assistant to the president for international economics, who said that although it pained him to say it, "The political conditions in both countries are just not conducive to the big deal."

Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., agreed to support legislation that would impose sanctions on Turkey unless the Trump administration certifies every 90 days that Turkey is not operating in Syria, according to a framework of the sanctions released Oct. 9. The legislation would sanction all U.S. assets belonging to Turkey’s top officials, including its president, vice president and ministers of defense, foreign affairs, treasury, trade and energy. It would also block U.S. defense exports to Turkey's military and impose sanctions on any foreign person or entity that sells to Turkey’s military or energy sector.

The Trump administration plans to soon issue export licenses to allow a “select few” U.S. companies to supply nonsensitive goods to Huawei, an Oct. 9 report in The New York Times said. Trump approved the step in a meeting last week, the report said, a little more than a month after the Commerce Department renewed the temporary general license for Huawei until Nov. 18 (see 1908190039).

Demand in global air freight markets is being significantly damaged by the U.S.-China trade war, according to the International Air Transport Association. August marked 10 consecutive months of year-on-year decreases in freight volumes, the IATA said, the longest such stretch since 2008. In addition, global export orders are continuing to fall, the association said, and emerging countries may be hurting the most because of their “higher sensitivity” to trade tensions and rising political instability.

In the Oct. 9 edition of the Official Journal of the European Union the following trade-related notices were posted:

The European Union is imposing a final “definitive” antidumping duty of €29.48 per kilogram ($32.35/kg) on its imports of U.S. urea and ammonium nitrate, it said in a notice in the Oct. 9 Official Journal. That rate will apply individually to the sole respondent to the EU’s investigation, CF Industries Holdings, Inc., as well as to all other U.S. exporters, the notice said. Duties will be assessed on entries on or after April 11, the date that the EU imposed preliminary interim measures (see 1904150062). No duties will be collected on entries before that date (including on or after March 22, when the EU imposed "registration" requirements.) The duty will remain in effect for a period of five years, and may be renewed for another five years in an expiry review at the end of that period. Duty rates will remain unchanged unless an interim review of the duties is requested.

Recent editions of Mexico's Diario Oficial list trade-related notices as follows:

The government of Canada issued the following trade-related notices as of Oct. 9 (note that some may also be given separate headlines):

Mexico’s Secretariat of Finance recently issued its 2019 edition of its General Regulations on Foreign Trade. Among other things, the new edition changes the deadline for customs clearance of disassembled machines, production lines or disassembled prefabricated buildings to 90 calendar days (previously it was a period of three months), said a circular from the Mexican Confederation of Customs Broker Associations (CAAAREM). The change takes effect Dec. 1, 2019. More information is available in a Latin American Confederation of Customs Brokers (CLAA) circular.