Reps. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., and Michael McCaul, R-Texas, are working on legislation that would strengthen U.S.-imposed sanctions on Russia, they said during a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting May 1. Engel said they are planning to introduce a bill that will “protect America’s interests, ramp up the targeted sanctions, enhance diplomacy and counter propaganda efforts to meet the Russian threat.” McCaul said he and Engel had breakfast with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo earlier that day and said “there’s no doubt” Pompeo “looks at Russia as a great threat” to the U.S. “I don't think this is a partisan issue,” McCaul said. “I hope we can pass legislation out of this committee.”
Maersk will offer a new customs clearance online shipping management platform in Germany, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom and Spain, the company said in a news release. “This new one-stop-shop allows us to timely and efficiently handle export and import declarations for our customers," said Vincent Clerc, chief commercial officer of A.P. Moller-Maersk. "The solution provides downstream benefits of full governance and compliance, eliminates the need to provide a quote as pricing is displayed online, saving three to five minutes per quote.” The company plans to expand the service to the rest of the world by the end of the year. "It saves our customers time, money and headaches reducing the number of intermediaries they deal with from three or four to just one as well as paperwork which subsequently reduce the time spent on transactional procedures," Clerc said. "Time saved they can then devote to grow their businesses.”
The World Customs Organization issued the following release on commercial trade and related matters:
Algeria revised its list of goods subject to temporary safeguard duties, removing a 30 percent tax on tree nuts, according to an April 25 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture' Foreign Agricultural Service. The change, made April 21, is expected to expand the U.S. export market for nuts, peanuts, butter and dried fruits, USDA said. The move comes less than a month after Algeria announced it was lifting a 2018 import ban on about 850 products and replacing it with temporary safeguard duties (see 1904160013). USDA has called tree nuts a "key" U.S. export to Algeria, which has imported an average of $33 million worth of U.S. tree nuts over the 2009-2017 calendar years.
In the April 30 edition of the Official Journal of the European Union the following trade-related notices were posted:
The European Union is setting to almost zero its long-standing retaliatory tariffs on certain U.S. products for U.S. distributions of antidumping and countervailing duties to affected U.S. industries, it said in a notice. With distributions amounting to only a few thousand this year, the tariff, which applies to corn of EU subheading 0710.40.00, jeans of EU subheading 6204.62.31, mobile cranes of heading 8705.10.00 and eyeglasses frames of former subheading 9003.19.00, will fall to 0.001%, down from 4.3% last year. The new tariff rates take effect May 1.
The European Court of Justice on April 30 upheld a controversial provision of the recent trade agreement between the European Union and Canada, clearing the way for full ratification of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. The court ruled that the investment court system set out in CETA does not conflict with EU treaties. “The decision by the Court means that no changes have to be made to the text of the EU-Canada agreement and Member States' ratifications can proceed,” the European Commission said in a press release. “Equally, no change will be required in the ICS provisions included in the agreements with Singapore, Mexico and Vietnam. The Commission will continue to negotiate the Investment Court System in bilateral agreements with other partners,” the release said. “The agreement with Canada is under provisional application since September 2017 and can only enter fully into force once ratified by all Member States and concluded by the Council.”
Recent editions of Mexico's Diario Oficial list trade-related notices as follows:
The government of Canada recently issued the following trade-related notices as of April 30 (note that some may also be given separate headlines):
Global Affairs Canada issued a notice to importers on April 29 to "inform importers of the procedures governing the administration of provisional safeguards, in the form of tariff rate quotas (TRQ)." Canada recently released some of its plans for implementing the two categories of safeguards (see 1904290207). "The TRQs will be administered by way of shipment-specific import permits," Global Affairs Canada said. "From April 29, 2019 until the end of the provisional safeguard period on May 12, 2019 there are two provisional TRQs that remain in force. The commodity goods (HS Codes) covered by each TRQ are in Commodity Codes handbook."