According to Reuters, Brazil's farm minister said the tariff-rate quota for wheat imports that was agreed to during Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's Washington visit this week (see 1903190056) was for all global wheat exporters, not exclusively the U.S.

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

The Canada Border Services Agency said maintenance outages are scheduled for the eManifest Portal, the Electronic Data Interchange and the CCS/CADEX system. There will be multiple outages to those systems on March 23 and March 24, CBSA said in an emailed message. CBSA suggested that filers review the contingency procedures during the outages and that highway carriers have paperwork if going to the border. While the CCS/CADEX system is unavailable, "Customs Declaration Message (CUSDEC) B3s and AO notification of release queries transmitted to the CADEX system will be affected," CBSA said.

Agreements on trade in cars and light passenger vehicles between Mexico and Argentina and Mexico and Brazil took effect March 19, according to a release from the Mexican Secretary of Economy. For Argentina, beginning in 2019, quotas will rise annually starting at 10 percent in the first year, and 5 percent each year in the second and third years. For Brazil, trade will begin March 19 with an “ICR” of 40 percent, with work continuing on a new formula for the quota, Mexico said.

A federal judge sentenced David Levick of Australia to two years in jail as a result of illegally exporting aircraft parts to a company in Iran, the Department of Justice said in a March 21 news release. The sentencing follows a 2012 indictment and extradition from Australia in December 2018. Levick was the general manager of ICM Components in Australia in 2007 and 2008 when he solicited purchase orders from someone representing a trading company in Iran. Levick then placed orders with U.S. companies for aircraft parts and other items that the Iranian person could not have directly purchased from the U.S. without government approval, the DOJ said. "When necessary, Levick used a broker in Tarpon Springs, Florida, through whom orders could be placed for the parts to further conceal the fact that the parts were intended for transshipment" to Iran, it said. "Levick intentionally concealed the ultimate end-use and end-users of the parts from manufacturers, distributors, shippers, and freight forwarders located in the United States and elsewhere. In addition, Levick and others structured their payments between each other for the parts to avoid trade restrictions imposed on Iranian financial institutions by other countries. Levick and ICM wired money to companies located in the United States as payment for the parts."

Multiple users reported, starting last month, issues with downloading data files on sanctions lists from the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control website after OFAC said it made changes regarding its HTTP request methods, the agency said in a March 20 notice. OFAC said the changes affected users that “leverage command line connections” to the Treasury’s website. Those who download OFAC sanctions data files “manually via browser” are not be impacted by the change, according to the notice. The change allows for users to only request sanctions data files via HTTP using GET commands, as opposed to both GET and POST commands, OFAC said. The agency said the change is permanent and was “made to improve the security for public file repositories.” The agency said questions about the change should be emailed to O_F_A_C@treasury.gov; OFAC’s technical support hotline is at 1-800-540-6322 (menu option 8).

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control’s recent action of sanctioning Evrofinance -- a Russian bank the U.S. suspects of working with the Venezuelan government -- was a two-part warning to Venezuela, the Kremlin and others, trade lawyer and former OFAC senior sanctions policy adviser Michael Dobson said in an interview. The U.S. will not hesitate to tighten restrictions on Venezuela, Dobson said, and it does not feel constrained to sanction “outside actors” assisting the Nicolas Maduro regime. The sanction (see 1903110014), announced in a March 11 OFAC notice, will be published in the March 22 Federal Register. Dobson, now a lawyer at Morrison Foerster, said he suspects Evrofinance of being a “very narrow vehicle” set up by Russia and Venezuela to facilitate trade and to “release some of the pressure from the Maduro regime's decreasing access to U.S. dollars.” The action will likely not become a trend for Venezuela, Dobson said, but a stand-alone action wherein the U.S. was able to enforce evasions of sanctions. “I think it’s just a warning,” Dobson said, adding that as long as U.S. companies aren’t doing business with Venezuela or Evrofinance, “I don't think this is going to have significant ripple effects.”

Testing for commodity jurisdiction requests in the State Department’s Defense Export Control and Compliance System (DECCS) won’t begin until the week of March 25, the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls said in an updated message on its website. The message had previously said testing would begin March 20 (see 1903200046). “Another announcement will be posted when the system is available for testing,” DDTC said.

Valery Kosmachov was extradited from Estonia to face federal charges in the U.S. related to a "scheme to illegally procure sophisticated electronic components" and smuggle them to Russia, the Department of Justice said in a March 20 news release. The indictment was filed in September 2017 but was only unsealed on March 20, said the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. Kosmachov was arrested in September 2018 and extradited to the U.S. on March 14, the DOJ said.

The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control updated its Specially Designated Nationals List while also issuing an updated guide on “addressing North Korea’s illicit shipping practices,” which includes risk mitigation measures and a summary of penalties for violators, according to a March 21 notice. The changes made to OFAC’s SDN list include the additions of three individuals associated with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an update to the SDN listing for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and the addition of two Chinese entities that violated North Korean sanctions regulations. The two Chinese entities are Dalian Haibo International Freight Co. and Liaoning Danxing International Forwarding Co., according to the notice.