Apr

2

Business as Usual in the UAE

Posted by at 10:03 pm on April 2, 2008
Category: Iran Sanctions
Strait of Hormuz
ABOVE: Strait of Hormuz

Some excellent reporting by Eric Lipton in an article in today’s New York Times suggests that the UAE is mostly giving lip service to export control.

Yousef al-Otaiba, an adviser to the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, said his country was more closely monitoring goods that it re-exported while blocking items that might help Iran build weapons systems. But trade experts and Iranian traders in Dubai said there was little evidence that the new export control law was being broadly enforced.

“It has virtually had no effect, to be honest,” said Nasser Hashempour, deputy president of the Iranian Business Council in Dubai. “If someone wants to move something — get it to Iran — it is easy to be done.”

Both Commerce and State have a more optimistic assessment, but, sadly, any proof of this was classified:

At the Commerce and State Departments, officials said they were encouraged by actions the Emirates had taken in some recent cases — the details of which are classified — that relied on their new authority under the export law. But they said an export licensing system must still be introduced and other enforcement steps taken.

Even so, Lipton quotes interviews with business in the UAE claiming that it’s business as usual with Iran:

S. M. Mir Ebrhimi, chief executive of Reza Nezam Trading, which operates mostly out of Iran, said he continued sending products with American-made components as usual. Mohammad Kazem, supervisor at Al Musafer Tourism and Cargo, said he had not even known his business was on the warning list. He said that the company followed the law, disputing any suggestion by American authorities that he had shipped prohibited items to Iran. He also said that he had seen no more inspections or spot checks by Emirati authorities.

(Full disclosure: Eric Lipton interviewed me in connection with the article, which includes a quote from me)

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Copyright © 2008 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
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2 Comments:

Well, at least the UAE has an export control law: The United States does not. The EAA expired nearly seven (7) years ago and despite proposals, several Congresses have not bothered to renew it. As Justice Blackmun – relying upon the verbatim record of the legislative history of IEEPA -made clear in Regan v. Wald, IEEPA is supposed to be for emergencies, not for a continuing state of affairs. Blackmun was right: I was there at the hearings and House mark up as a staffer of both the EAA Amendments and IEEPA (title III of which also amended the EAA). At the full committee mark up of the EAA renewal in 1977, Bingamon stated that they intended that the sunset provision in the EAA be taken seriously. Furthermore, IEEPA only replicates TWEA Sec/5(b), not the entire 44 sections of TWEA: Under TWEA, the authority to regulate trade, as defined by Sec. 2 of TWEA, wasn’t in Sec. 5(b), the authority to regulate trade was in TWEA Sec. 3. As made clear in the legislative history of the original 1917 actand the amendments of 1942, TWEA Sec. 5(b) was never intended to be authority to regulate trade (otherwise Sec. 3 would have been redundant, not acceptable in the jurisprudence of statutory construction). Rather, Section 5(b) was intended to regulate then existing interests, legal and equitable, of enemy states and their nationals in extant property. Indeed, the legislative history of both the original 1917 act and the 1942 amendments state that it was intended to be a codification of and partial relief from the harshness of the common law offense of trading with the enemy.

Cain’t one of you K Street lawyers git one of your summer clerks to do a law review article on the history of TWEA so OFAC and BIS cain’t keep gittin away with distorting history to their own dark purposes.

Comment by Mike Deal on April 3rd, 2008 @ 7:54 pm

I’m a New York Avenue lawyer. 🙂

Comment by Clif Burns on April 3rd, 2008 @ 8:58 pm