The U.K. said it generally won’t penalize an organization for using a “suspense account” to temporarily record sanctioned assets, the country’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation said in new frequently asked question 145 published this week.
China’s Commerce Ministry this week issued a new guidance document about how the country interprets and plans to strengthen its trade policy compliance, particularly with World Trade Organization rules. The guidance calls on various Chinese government offices to make sure any proposed policies comply with WTO rules, and it stressed that China should “respond to foreign compliance concerns” raised at the WTO while also raising concerns at the trade body “about other members' illegal measures.”
The State Department approved a possible $1.96 billion military sale to Qatar, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said this week. The sale includes eight "MQ-9B Remotely Piloted Aircraft" and related equipment. The principal contractors will be General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Lockheed Martin, RTX Corp., L3Harris, Boeing and Leonardo SpA.
A federal government payment website, Pay.gov, will be offline March 29 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. EDT for the release of a new version of the application, the State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls said. "This outage will affect users paying their Registration fees during this window," it said.
DOJ filed a civil forfeiture complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on March 26 looking to collect $47 million in proceeds from the sale of nearly "one million barrels of Iranian petroleum," claiming the money is property of, or "affording a person a source of influence over," the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or its Qods Force, DOJ announced.
The Senate voted 53-43 along party lines late March 26 to confirm former Assistant Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender as deputy treasury secretary. The Treasury Department issued a statement welcoming Faulkender’s confirmation; it didn't say whether he had been sworn in yet. At a Senate Finance Committee hearing on his nomination in early March, Faulkender said he wants to study whether changes should be made to the Biden administration’s October 2024 rule restricting outbound investment in China (see 2503060069).
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch, R-Idaho, and Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman emeritus of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, both said March 26 that they welcome the Trump administration’s decision to add 82 entities, mostly tech firms in mainland China, to the Commerce Department’s Entity List (see 2503250075).
Reps. Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, and Jim Himes, D-Conn., reintroduced a bill March 26 that would require the administration to develop a strategy to prevent the use of digital assets for illicit activity, including sanctions evasion. The Financial Technology Protection Act, which the House passed in the last Congress (see 2407230002), was referred to the House Financial Services Committee. Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., is expected to reintroduce a Senate companion.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved by voice vote March 27 a bill aimed at curbing China’s export of fentanyl precursor chemicals to Mexican drug traffickers.
CBP on March 31 will officially retire the trade export data universe in ACE reports and replace it with an “enhancement” to the Automated Export System universe, the agency said. Before the retirement, filers of ACE Reports “must repoint any saved Trade Export reports to the” AES universe. They can do this through a two-step process: