Senior Treasury Department official Brian Nelson met this week with nongovernmental organizations, international organizations and others to discuss the U.S. designation of the Yemen-based Houthis as a terrorist organization, which will take effect next month and subject the group to strict financial sanctions (see 2401170025).
Several lawmakers urged the Biden administration to reimpose sanctions on Venezuela after the country’s supreme court barred opposition leader Maria Corina Machado from this year’s presidential election.
The Treasury Department said this week it’s considering designating Iraqi-based Al-Huda Bank as a foreign financial institution of primary money laundering concern, and sanctioned its owner Hamad al-Moussawi. A proposed rule released by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network could “sever the bank” from the U.S. financial system by blocking banks from opening or maintaining a correspondent account for or on behalf of the bank.
The U.S. and the U.K. this week announced joint sanctions against a network of people who try to kidnap or assassinate Iranian dissidents and opposition activists around the world.
The Bureau of Industry and Security is drafting an interim final rule that could clarify export control rules for certain semiconductors and expand a license exception for government end users. The rule, sent for interagency review Jan. 26, could clarify controls on certain “Radiation Hardened Integrated Circuits” and expand License Exception GOV (Governments, international organizations, international inspections under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the International Space Station).
The Commerce Department is proposing new rules that could require U.S. cloud service providers and their foreign resellers to follow know-your-customer (KYC) requirements, a step the agency said would prevent those services from being used to aid cyberattacks and to train artificial intelligence models that threaten U.S. national security. The proposed regulations are specifically aimed at preventing “foreign malicious cyber actors” from using U.S. infrastructure-as-a-service products to steal American intellectual property and sensitive data, commit espionage, and train large AI models for cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructure.
Dutch chip equipment maker ASML isn’t expecting to receive export licenses this year to ship several of its deep ultraviolet immersion lithography systems to China, along with one older DUV tool not previously disclosed by the company.
The Bureau of Industry and Security is undergoing a restructuring to separate its licensing work from its efforts to evaluate and protect emerging and foundational technologies, said Eileen Albanese, director of the Office of National Security and Technology Transfer Controls. She said the agency plans to hire at least three new senior officials to usher in the reorganization, which will help BIS meet its “broader mandate.”
The U.S. and the EU are making progress on more closely aligning their encryption-related export controls, a senior Bureau of Industry and Security official said last week, along with differences in export licensing and classification.
The Bureau of Industry and Security will likely issue more penalty announcements this year for export control violations, a former senior BIS enforcement official said, suggesting the current state of enforcement is unprecedented.