Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security on Aug. 19 renewed the temporary general license for Huawei and added 46 more of the company’s non-U.S. affiliates to the Entity List, bringing the total number of impacted Huawei affiliates to more than 100.
Border clearance for trucks crossing the Straits of Dover from the United Kingdom to France may slow to 40 percent to 60 percent of the current flow within one day of a no-deal Brexit, according to a leaked U.K. government memo published by The Times of London on Aug. 18. And “significant disruption” at the French border may last up to six months after the U.K. leaves the EU with no transition deal, the report said.
A trade credit insurer will settle for about $345,000 after it violated the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Sanctions Regulations, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said in an Aug. 16 enforcement notice. The company, Maryland-based Atradius Trade Credit Insurance, allegedly completed transactions with sanctioned entities.
President Donald Trump said he doesn’t think China will retaliate for the U.S.’s planned 10 percent tariff on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods scheduled to take effect in December, Trump told reporters Aug. 15.
China will take “necessary countermeasures” if the U.S. imposes an additional 10 percent duty on $300 billion worth of Chinese imports, the Chinese State Council’s Customs Tariff Commission said Aug. 15, according to Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency. The move “seriously violated the consensus” reached by the two countries and “deviated from the right track of settling differences through consultations,” the official said, according to Xinhua. The statement was in response to President Donald Trump’s announcement that the U.S. would be increasing tariffs on Chinese goods on Sept. 1. Trump later said the tariffs would be postponed until December.
The State Department announced sanctions on Zhuhai Zhenrong, China’s state-owned oil company, for buying petroleum from Iran, according to a notice in the Aug. 15 Federal Register. The sanctions -- which target the company and Youmin Li, its executive director and general manager -- take effect Sept. 16.
Japan is unsure about the details of South Korea’s decision to remove Japan’s preferential trade status, a Japanese official said, but thinks the move won’t have much of an impact.
Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with some of the top stories for Aug. 5-9 in case they were missed.
One of the top concerns of the U.S. firearms industry is the delay in transitioning export controls of firearms and ammunition from the State Department to the Commerce Department, said Larry Keane, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. As the wait for Export Control Reform has increased -- beginning in 2009 under the Obama administration and continuing under the Trump administration -- the U.S. firearms industry increasingly feels as if it has been left behind, Keane said.
The Treasury Department’s most recent Venezuela-related general licenses “stop just short of a total embargo” on the country’s government, said Adrienne Braumiller, a trade lawyer and member of the Commerce Department’s Regulations and Procedures Technical Advisory Committee. Some companies will need to pay close attention to the updated expiration dates for certain general licenses, she said, and banks will be faced with a “new level of depth” to the complexity of screening their customers.