The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued its first set of national anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism financing priorities, identifying corruption, cyber crime, drug trafficking and other activities that pose the biggest threats to the U.S. The priorities, issued June 30 and required by the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020, will be followed by a set of regulations and revisions to the Bank Secrecy Act, several U.S. agencies said in a joint statement.
A shift toward list-based sanctions and a rise in federal government compliance expectations are causing increasing challenges for the compliance community, compliance professionals said. At the center of those challenges are the designations imposed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which is setting a high bar for due diligence by more clearly describing its compliance expectations in settlement agreements.
Hong Kong this month updated its export control lists for certain chemical weapons and strategic commodities to align its regulations with multilateral export control groups. The revisions reflect control changes recently made by the Wassenaar Arrangement, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Australia Group and the Chemical Weapons Convention, Hong Kong’s Trade and Industry Department said June 11. Hong Kong said it added controls on four sets of “toxic chemicals” and newly developed technologies such as “read-out integrated circuits” used for “night vision capability.” It also “relaxed controls” on some dual-use items, including “signal analysers, supercomputer, [and] radio equipment having quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) techniques.”
The Bureau of Industry and Security fined a Fredericksburg, Virginia, military equipment manufacturer $200,000 for illegally exporting military-related items to military end-users in Russia, BIS said in a June 28 order. The company, Patriot 3, exported maritime jet boots with underwater propulsion systems despite having “knowledge” that the shipment violated the Export Administration Regulations, the order said. BIS said the boots, which were worth about $330,000 and exported in 2014, were controlled in connection with exports to military end-users or for military end-uses in Russia. Patriot 3 sent the boots to the Russian government’s Federal Guard Service, BIS said.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control on June 28 updated a Belarus-related entry on its Specially Designated Nationals List. The update made changes to the entry for Oleg Leonidovich Slizhevsky, head of the Belarus Public Associations Department at the Ministry of Justice.
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The U.S. and its allies should expand sanctions and continue cutting off China from sensitive technologies as it further undermines democracy in Hong Kong, experts and a U.S. lawmaker said. They also said the U.S. should consider making China meet certain human rights standards before allowing companies to do business there and should work closer with European partners to close off Chinese access to global markets.
The U.S. designated Ousmane Illiassou Djibo, also known as Petit Chapori, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, the State Department said June 28. Djibo is a native Nigerian and leader of the Islamic State Group operating in the Sahara region.
The United Arab Emirates recently introduced “significant” changes to how it administers sanctions, expanding its largely multilateral sanctions regime to also include unilateral measures, Akin Gump said June 28. The regime places new obligations on people and businesses in the UAE, including requirements to screen customers, freeze their assets and cut off transactions if customers violate UAE sanctions.
The multilateral Nuclear Suppliers Group met last week for the first time in more than a year to discuss export controls over nuclear weapons, the Iran nuclear deal, nonproliferation trade restrictions and more. The 48 member countries proposed updates to NSG export control lists and tapped a U.S. official to be a new group chair. Last year’s plenary was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.