The government of Canada recently issued the following trade-related notices as of May 8 (note that some may also be given separate headlines):
The State Department announced that R. Clarke Cooper was confirmed April 30 in the Senate as the assistant secretary for Political Military Affairs, in a May 2 notice. Cooper previously served as director of intelligence planning for Joint Special Operations Command’s Joint Inter-Agency Task Force -- National Capital Region, State said, and was a George W. Bush administration U.S. alternate representative to the United Nations Security Council. The White House advanced the nomination to the Senate, for a second time, in January.
The World Customs Organization issued the following release on commercial trade and related matters:
In the May 7 edition of the Official Journal of the European Union the following trade-related notices were posted:
The United Kingdom on May 3 published guidance on several sanctions regimes, including the ISIL (Da’esh) and Al-Qaida sanctions, the Democratic Republic of Congo sanctions, the Counter-Terrorism sanctions and the Zimbabwe sanctions. The guidance documents describe practices for sanctions compliance, including in financial- and trade-related sectors, and detail exceptions for the sanctions regimes. Licenses for trade exceptions may only be issued under the Zimbabwe sanctions and the Congo sanctions, according to the documents. Violating any of the sanctions in the financial sector can lead to a six-month prison sentence and a fine, while sanctions violations in the trade sector can lead to a maximum 10-year prison sentence and a fine.
Recent editions of Mexico's Diario Oficial list trade-related notices as follows:
Mexico will move the headquarters of its customs service to Nuevo Laredo, said General Administrator of Customs Ricardo Peralta, according to a report in La Verdad de Tamaulipas. Peralta confirmed the move during a meeting in Mexico City with Mayor Enrique Rivas Cuellar of Nuevo Laredo, Mayor Pete Saenz of Laredo, Texas, and Edgardo Pedraza Quintanilla of the Nuevo Laredo Customs Broker Association, the report said. The “decentralization” process is part of a broader customs reform that will see the creation of an independent Mexican customs agency (see 1904150042).
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency will soon begin to add the first commodity group of a phased-in approach for implementing organic import requirements in the Automated Import Reference System, the CFIA said in a May 7 email. "To implement the import requirements into AIRS, CFIA will use a phased-in approach which will involve creating new commodity identifiers (OGD extension codes) for organic products by commodity type," it said. "The fresh fruits and vegetables will be the first commodity group to be implemented on May 29th, 2019. The list of the new OGD extensions will be made available prior to the AIRS publication."
The National Marine Manufacturers Association celebrated Canada's full removal of tariffs on multiple types of boats from the U.S., in a May 6 news release. The Department of Finance Canada recently announced the change, which is expected to run in Canada Gazette on May 15, the NMMA said. Effective April 30, Canada's 10 percent retaliatory tariffs won't apply to the following items:
India’s Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs is looking into the “quality and cost of services” in the country’s customs, such as shipping lines and customs brokers, and is planning to abandon “physical supervision” in bonded warehouses, according to a May 7 report from the India Brand Equity Foundation. The announcement is part of a larger examination by the CBIC into “issues” faced by its exporters in an attempt to improve “trade facilitation.”