Walmart and its Brazilian subsidiary settled for $137 million after the Department of Justice said both violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, according to a June 20 press release. The subsidiary, WMT Brasilia S.a.r.l, pleaded guilty to the charges.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee on June 20 advanced a bill that would impose sanctions on Burmese officials and military-owned entities, for human rights abuses. The bill, named the Burma Act of 2019, would also sanction current and former senior officials of the Burmese military -- and any entities they own -- who took “significant steps to impede investigations or prosecutions of alleged serious human rights abuses.” The bill would also sanction entities, such as the Myanmar Economic Cooperation or the Myanmar Economic Holding Corporation, that are controlled by Burmese security forces. The sanctions would take effect for an eight-year period beginning 270 days after the bill is enacted. The bill next heads to the House floor.

CBP is pushing back by another 30 days the change of Automated Export System codes 227 and 007 from “informational” to “fatal,” it said in a CSMS message. Code 227, Forwarding Agent Party Missing, and Code 007, Header Filer ID Type Must be E or D, had been set to transition to fatal errors on June 22. They will now become AES fatal errors on July 20.

The Trump administration is continuing sanctions against North Korea, the White House said June 21, citing the risk it poses to U.S. national security. The White House pointed to North Korea’s “proliferation of weapons-usable fissile material,” the destabilizing actions of the country’s government that “imperil” U.S. trading partners in the region, and its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The sanctions were scheduled to expire June 26. The move extends an executive order from June 26, 2008, that declared a national emergency with regard to North Korea.

The European Union Council renewed sanctions against Russian people and entities for the “illegal annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol by the Russian Federation,” according to a June 20 council decision. The sanctions ban all imports into the EU originating in Crimea or Sevastopol except if those goods were “granted a certificate of origin by the Government of Ukraine,” according to the original decision. The sanctions were renewed for one year until June 23, 2020.

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned four Nicaraguan government officials who allegedly “persecute Nicaraguan citizens,” “enact repressive laws,” silence the press and restrict medical care to the country’s people, Treasury said in a June 21 press release. OFAC is sanctioning Gustavo Eduardo Porras Cortes, Orlando Jose Castillo Castillo, Sonia Castro Gonzalez and Oscar Salvador Mojica Obregon.

The World Customs Organization will be reconsidering some classification decisions at the next Harmonized System Committee meeting in September, according to law firm Sandler Travis. The reconsideration involves classification decisions of "at least two products -- certain vitamins and certain RF generators and RE matching networks -- after reservations were filed by the U.S. and others against the classification decisions," Sandler Travis said in a June 20 email.

Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security added five Chinese entities to its Entity List, the latest escalation in the U.S. and China’s ongoing trade war. The move restricts the entities' ability to purchase certain U.S. products and will require licenses for all items subject to the Export Administration Regulations with a review policy of presumption of denial. The entities are: Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit, Chengdu Haiguang Microelectronics Technology, Higon, Sugon and Wuxi Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology. The Wuxi Jiangnan Institute is owned by owned by the Chinese government, Commerce said.

In the June 20 edition of the Official Journal of the European Union the following trade-related notices were posted:

The European Union is adopting changes to its system of tariff-rate quotas for agricultural and industrial products, it said in a notice published June 20 in the EU Official Journal. The changes include the creation of six new TRQs, increases to quantity for three TRQs, and the elimination of five TRQs, many because implementation of internationally-agreed tariff cuts for information technology goods mean they are no longer necessary. The changes mostly take effect July 1.