The Treasury Department declined a request by the two leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to impose Global Magnitsky sanctions against leading Chinese surveillance company Hikvision for human rights violations, Chair Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said this week.
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said Jan. 18 that he remains committed to passing two China-related investment measures that failed to become law last year.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee is renewing a push to pass a bipartisan bill that could expand the Treasury Department’s upcoming outbound investment prohibitions to cover more Chinese technology sectors and additional countries. But some lawmakers disagree on the best way to scope U.S. investment restrictions under the bill, arguing that they should be imposed through individual sanctions on specific entities rather than on whole technology industries.
The Bureau of Industry and Security believes its export controls are adequate to protect all 19 of the critical and emerging technology categories identified by the White House as important to national security (see 2202090016), a BIS official said on Jan. 17.
Andrew Astuno, a former Treasury Department official who worked on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., has joined Clifford Chance as a CFIUS lawyer, he announced this week on LinkedIn. Astuno was a policy adviser with Treasury’s Office of Investment Security before leaving in early 2022 to join Stroock & Stroock.
The State Department gathered an undisclosed “group of countries” last week to “strategize” on ways to curb the supply of parts to Iranian drones, a department official said Jan. 17.
The U.S. this week announced plans to designate the Yemen-based Houthis as a terrorist organization, which will subject them to strict financial sanctions that will restrict their access to funding and financial markets, the White House said Jan. 17. The designation comes after months of Houthi-led attacks on commercial ships transiting the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (see 2401030065 and 2401050066), which National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said “fit the textbook definition of terrorism.”
Rep. Jake LaTurner, R-Kan., called on two key members of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. to prevent Cnano Technology USA, a subsidiary of China-based Cnano Jiangsu Technology Co. Ltd., from opening a manufacturing plant for electric vehicle battery parts in Johnson County, Kansas.
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The EU should require member states to report Russia-related sanctions enforcement data, audit their sanctions implementation efforts and step up enforcement against violators, a think tank network said in a set of 11 policy recommendations for 2024. The group said implementation and enforcement of Russia sanctions “will be critical” this year.