Three former U.S. intelligence community or military members -- Marc Baier, Ryan Adams and Daniel Gericke -- entered into a deferred prosecution agreement, agreeing to pay more than $1.68 million to resolve export control violation charges, the Department of Justice said. The trio worked as senior managers at a United Arab Emirates-based company that carried out computer hacking operations to benefit the UAE government during 2016 to 2019, DOJ said. All three were told repeatedly that their work constituted a “defense service” under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, requiring a license from the State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls. Nevertheless, all three continued their hacking without a license, court documents laid out.
Three members of a Florida family were charged with conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran and money laundering, the Department of Justice said. Mohammad Faghihi, along with his wife, Farzeneh Modarresi, and sister, Faezeh Faghihi, led Florida-based Express Gene -- a company that allegedly received multiple wire transfers from accounts in Malaysia, China, Singapore, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, totaling nearly $3.5 million, between October 2016 and November 2020. Some of this money allegedly was used to buy and then ship genetic sequencing equipment to Iran without a license from the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, DOJ said.
Senate Republicans said they will drop their objections to two Treasury Department nominees slated to oversee the agency’s sanctions work (see 2106220037) if the Biden administration sanctions the company behind the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project. In a Sept. 13 letter to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez, D-N.J., Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania laid out their conditions for dropping their opposition and said they are “hopeful” President Joe Biden will commit to sanctions against Nord Stream 2 AG.
The Bureau of Industry and Security should establish a blanket exemption for U.S. people and companies to participate in standards-setting bodies that have members designated on the Entity List, industry officials said. Although BIS has been working on a final rule (see 2012150037) that would clarify how export restrictions apply to the release of controlled technology at standards-setting organizations, officials from the telecommunications industry and other technology sectors are unsure how the rule’s final language will read and are concerned some of the agency’s restrictions, which they view as unnecessary, may continue.
The United Kingdom's Department for International Trade and HM Treasury will host webinars on post-Brexit international trade sanctions Sept. 21 at 10 a.m. EDT and Sept. 23 at 10 a.m. EDT.
The State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls will perform scheduled maintenance on its Defense Export Control and Compliance System 8 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. EDT Sept. 16, the agency said in a notice this week. DECCS will be unavailable to industry during this time. The agency said users should ensure their “work in progress is saved prior to the scheduled downtime.”
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The Bureau of Industry and Security this week sent a final rule for interagency review that would expand export controls on certain biological equipment software. The rule, received by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Sept. 13, would amend the Commerce Control List by adding a new Export Control Classification Number to control software “for the operation of automated nucleic acid assemblers and synthesizers” that are “capable of designing and building functional genetic elements from digital sequence data.”
The European Commission opened a consulting period on amendments to its Blocking Statute, publishing an impact assessment on the regulation. The commission has received responses from the Italian Banking Association; Spectaris, the German Industrial Association for Optics, Photonics, Analytical and Medical Technology; the Medical Engineering Industry Association; and two anonymous sources. The consulting period will run for 12 weeks from the beginning of August. The impact assessment originally said that the blocking statute should be changed due to the increasing complexity and proliferation of extraterritorial sanctions and the European Union's exposure to certain third countries (see 2108110014). The blocking regulations are meant to protect EU businesses from extraterritorial sanctions, including those imposed by the U.S., which are increasingly leading to global sanctions compliance issues in Europe.
The U.S. should use the upcoming inaugural meeting of the U.S.-European Union Trade and Technology Council (see 2109090004) to convince the European Union to adopt more measures to “constrain China,” including stricter export controls and investment screening, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation said Sept. 13. If used correctly, the council could become a significant and useful U.S. tool to increase multilateral trade restrictions on China, the group said. “U.S. negotiators need to define success not as becoming more like the EU or increasing cooperation for cooperation’s sake,” ITIF said, “but rather in increasing cooperation while also advancing key U.S. national interests and maintaining core elements of the U.S. technology policy ecosystem.”