Archive for the ‘OFAC’ Category

Apr

6

Wilkommen im Hotel Norkschwein

Posted by at 8:03 pm on April 6, 2017
Category: North Korea Sanctions • OFAC

Cityhostel Berlin via https://www.facebook.com/cityhostelinberlin/photos/a.148927855171875.32730.112639112134083/968420149889304/?type=3&theater [Fair Use]One of the problem with the Nork sanctions passed by the U.N. is that they rely on member states for their enforcement and not all member states are, well, super excited about sanctioning the Norks. We’re looking at you, China.

But it seems the Germans may also be looking the other way.  Consider the Cityhostel Berlin tucked away on the Glinkastraße, barely spitting distance from the Brandenburg Gate and, more importantly, the North Korean Embassy.  According to this article in Deutsche Welle, the Cityhostel is actually part of a large complex of buildings ceded to North Korea by the East Germans (bless their hearts) before the Berlin Wall was torn down.   They use it for their Embassy, and they rent space to the Berlin Cityhostel, which thereby provides extra income to Kim Jong Un and his nuclear program.

The problem is UN Resolution 2321 prohibits member states from allowing the Norks to use real property that they own for anything other than diplomatic or consular activities.  The German foreign ministry, when asked about this, did a creditable imitation of Baron Munchausen, with this obvious exaggeration:

We are closely monitoring potential violations of the sanctions regime imposed by the UN Security Council and, together with our partners, strictly observing the sanctions against North Korea.

Right. And I bet that the ministry also just saved itself from drowning by pulling on its hair and then, just for fun, took a ride on a cannonball.

Some of my U.S. readers are now probably wondering, besides how you can ride on a cannonball, whether they can stay at Hotel Norkschwein, I mean the Cityhostel, on their next trip to Berlin. Executive Order 13722 blocks all property of the North Korean government and, more importantly, prohibits any U.S. person from “making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of” the North Korean government. Certainly there is an argument that paying a hotel bill in a hotel leased from the Norks might be considered to fall within this prohibition.

The question, then, is whether the travel exemption would permit U.S. citizens to spend the night in Kim Jong Un’s little Berlin hideaway. That exemption prohibits regulation under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (“IEEPA”), of transactions “ordinarily incident to travel to or from any country.” This would normally cover, and exempt from prohibition, paying for hotels while in Berlin. But Executive Order 13722 was also enacted pursuant to the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016, which means that the travel exemption in IEEPA would not apply. Nor has OFAC promulgated regulations under Executive Order 13722 which would exempt travel related transactions.

So, even if you are completely comfortable with throwing your hard-earned money into Kim Jong Un’s nuclear piggy bank, you do so at your own risk if you are a U.S. citizen.

Permalink Comments Off on Wilkommen im Hotel Norkschwein

Bookmark and Share


Copyright © 2017 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
(No republication, syndication or use permitted without my consent.)
Apr

5

American University in Beirut Dinged by DOJ for SDN Listing in Directory Database

Posted by at 8:59 pm on April 5, 2017
Category: Civil Penalties • OFAC • SDN List

AUB - College Hall by marviikad [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Flickr https://flic.kr/p/fLntMv [cropped]The American University in Beirut (the “AUB”) recently agreed to pay $700,000 to settle claims in a civil suit under the False Claims Act brought by the United States. One of the violations alleged was that the AUB, while receiving funds under government contracts with USAID, provided material support to Jihad al-Binaa, an SDN designated under the SDGT program, by “including Jihad al-Binaa in a database that AUB maintained on its public website (the “NGO database”) for the stated purpose of connecting Non-Governmental Organizations (“NGOs”) with students and others interested in assisting them.”

This seems to run contrary to guidance from OFAC that says that the so-called informational materials exception (otherwise known as the Berman Amendment) allows listings in membership directories. In this guidance, issued in 2003, OFAC says this

The listing of basic information on a website in a uniform format for companies around the world, including Iran, by a U.S. person, is not prohibited by the ITR. … You note in your letter that the information being added to the enhanced listings displayed on your website is based on pre-existing information supplied by customers wishing to purchase enhanced advertising from the U.S. Company. The posting of this alternative layout of information on your website regarding companies in Iran, including additional data elements of identifying information, would not be prohibited, as long as the U.S. Company does not provide any marketing services to customers in Iran or substantively enhance information provided by Iranian customers.

The same logic would seem to apply whether the sanctioned party is a resident of Iran or an SDN designated under another program.

There may be, however, some reasons why it might not. Section 594.201(a)(4)(i) prohibits the provision of “financial, material, or technological support” to an entity designated under those regulations. And although section 594.305 of the SDGT regulations contains the standard definition of “informational materials,” that term, oddly, is not used elsewhere in the SDGT regulations and there is not an explicit informational materials exemption as there is, for example, in 560.210(c) of the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations. This means that there is at least an argument that the provision of informational materials to an SDN designated under the SDGT program might constitute prohibited “financial, material or technological” support to that SDN.

The language of the Berman Amendment, set forth in 50 U.S.C. § 1702(b)(3) prohibits regulation of “importation from any country, or the exportation to any country” of informational materials. Arguably, the prohibition of provision of informational materials to an SDN does not involve the prohibition of the importation or exportation of informational materials.

The better criticism of the government’s case here is whether simply listing an SDN in a database for students is a financial, material or technological support of the SDN. If it is, then one might wonder whether OFAC violates its own regulations by providing a listing, complete with an address and alternate names, in the SDN directory, er, list. Also, one has to wonder about how Facebook gets away with giving Jihad al-Binaa its own page without violating the rule if this kind of activity if “financial, material or technological” support. The answer is simple: providing this sort of information on the Internet is not such support.

Photo Credit: AUB – College Hall by marviikad [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Flickr https://flic.kr/p/fLntMv [cropped]. Copyright 2014 marviikad

Permalink Comments (1)

Bookmark and Share


Copyright © 2017 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
(No republication, syndication or use permitted without my consent.)
Mar

15

Word of the Day: Peloteros

Posted by at 6:04 pm on March 15, 2017
Category: Baseball • Cuba Sanctions • OFAC

Cuba Baseball Stamp [Fair Use]It’s time for our annual Cuba baseball post which each year has been motivated by cold weather, spring training, and anxious anticipation of opening day. And what better subject for this post than the recently concluded trial in Miami in which Bartolo Hernandez, a baseball agent, and Julio Estrada, a baseball trainer, were accused of smuggling Cuban players into the United States and which featured testimony by one of these peleteros about how he ate his fake Haitian passport on his plane trip to the United States. (Insert optional better-than-airline-food joke here.)

One of the key elements of the case is section 515.505 of the Cuban Assets Control Regulation which unblocks Cuban nationals after they have established residency in a country outside Cuba other than the United States. The other element is that an unblocked Cuban in a third country is, under Major League Baseball’s rules, a “free agent” that can negotiate higher salaries; Cubans who come directly to the United States and become unblocked by seeking permanent residence here are eligible to be signed to an MLB team only through the amateur draft system and will not be able to command the astronomical salaries of a free agent.

According to prosecutors, the defendants smuggled the Cubans into third countries and then forged documents that could be used to evidence residency in those countries. The payoff to the defendants was the high commissions (allegedly around $150 million) that they received on the salaries of their free agent clients. The defense claimed that the two defendants did not forge documents and were unaware that the players, desperate to get to the United States, were using forged documents. The jury, however, convicted both men earlier today.

In other baseball news, opening day for the Chicago Cubs is Sunday, April 2, in St. Louis, a town that even the Rams had the good sense to escape.  Go Cubs Go!

Permalink Comments (1)

Bookmark and Share


Copyright © 2017 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
(No republication, syndication or use permitted without my consent.)
Mar

6

Penn Senate Rum Runners Eye Cuban Rum

Posted by at 5:58 pm on March 6, 2017
Category: Cuba Sanctions • OFAC

Havana Club on the Road to Havana by Richard Smallbone [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Flickr https://flic.kr/p/nxC2Pr [cropped and processed]A story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (and not, I swear, in The Onion) reveals that a bunch of Pennsylvania state legislators flew off to Cuba where they concocted this genius plan. Step 1: ship boatloads of rum from Cuba to state liquor stores in Pennsylvania without an OFAC license and in defiance of the embargo. Step 2: argue that Pennsylvania can simply ignore the embargo and import all the rum it wants for ever and ever because of Clause 2 of the Twenty-First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Seriously. (The esteemed University of Pennsylvania Law School is reportedly so embarrassed by the legal reasoning of its local legislators that it packed up in the middle of the night and relocated to the recently vacated Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego.)

If you just clicked on the above link to the Twenty-First Amendment, you are probably pretty confused as to how anyone, state senators included, could argue that this clause allows a state to import Cuban rum in violation of the Cuban embargo. After all, it reads:

The transportation or importation into any state, territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.

It seems clear from the language and the history of Clause 2 that it was designed to allow states, if they wanted, to remain dry and regulate the sale of liquor in their own states. Mississippi, bless its heart, stayed dry until 1966. Kansas prohibited public bars until 1987. (Useful trivia: the reason Dorothy said to Toto, after landing in Oz, that they weren’t in Kansas any more was because she saw a bar.)

The clause has been read to give states the right to regulate the importation of liquor from other states by imposing taxes that would otherwise violate the Commerce Clause. But the courts have pretty much stopped there, with Craig v. Boren holding that Clause 2 did not permit states to set different drinking ages for men and women and California Liquor Dealers v. Midcal Aluminum holding that Clause 2 did not override the federal Sherman Act.

All that being said, nothing in Clause 2 which allows states to restrict importation and sale of liquor to their hearts’ content also allows states to import liquor in violation of federal law.  It says that imports prohibited by state law are prohibited, not that imports permitted by state law are permitted.  Morever, even if it did, the embargo would still apply.  If Clause 2 doesn’t trump the Sherman Act, it certainly doesn’t trump the Trading with the Enemy Act or Helms-Burton.

Moral of the story: legal theories concocted after long afternoons of daiquiris and mojitos in Havana will not likely survive judicial scrutiny.

Photo Credit: Havana Club on the Road to Havana by Richard Smallbone [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Flickr https://flic.kr/p/nxC2Pr [cropped and processed]. Copyright 2013 Richard Smallbone

Permalink Comments Off on Penn Senate Rum Runners Eye Cuban Rum

Bookmark and Share


Copyright © 2017 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
(No republication, syndication or use permitted without my consent.)
Feb

23

Federal Judge Protects Banks from Injured Sailors and Widows

Posted by at 5:15 pm on February 23, 2017
Category: OFAC • Sanctions • Sudan • Terrorism Risk Insurance Act

Image viahttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:INTEL-COGNITIVE-Cole.jpg [Public Domain]A recent decision by a federal district court in New York prohibited sailors and their families holding a $314 million judgement against Sudan from collecting any of the judgment from funds that had been wired by a Sudanese bank to various other banks and that were then blocked under the Sudanese Sanctions Regulations.  The judgment arose from Sudan’s participation in Al Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S.S. Cole on October 12, 2000.  Instead, now that the Sudanese Sanctions have been lifted, those funds will go to the banks and not to the sailors and their families.

The decision is premised on a highly questionable reading of section 201(a) the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. That section permits victims of terrorism to execute judgments arising from a terrorist act “against the blocked assets of that terrorist party,” including the blocked assets of “any agency or instrumentality of” that terrorist party.

At issue were funds transferred by El Nilein Bank.  The bank was an instrumentality of the Sudanese government when the funds were blocked, which is why they were blocked in the first place, but not at the time the plaintiff sought to attach the assets. The court held that the TRIA did not apply because El Nilein was not an agency of the Sudanese government at the time the plaintiffs attempted to attach the funds and because the blocked funds, under New York law, were the property of the blocking bank and not El Nilein.

Oddly, the court reached these conclusions without even citing the definition of “blocked assets” in section 201(d)(2) of the TRIA, a definition which would seem to mandate the exact opposite conclusion.

The term “blocked asset” means— (A) any asset seized or frozen by the United States under section 5(b) of the Trading With the Enemy Act (50 U.S.C. App. 5(b)) or under sections 202 and 203 of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701; 1702)

As readers of this blog know well, OFAC takes the position that assets can be frozen under IEEPA even if they are not legally owned by the blocked party and are legally owned by another party. It is sufficient that the blocked person have some interest, direct or indirect, including a contingent interest. So an asset can be a “blocked asset” of a party even if it is not the property of that party.   Moreover, under the court’s analysis, a wire blocked by an intermediate bank can never be levied against under TRIA unless the intermediate bank was itself a blocked party — an absurd result that Congress never could have intended.

This definition of “blocked asset” also is inconsistent with the Court’s idea that the blocked assets could not be seized because Nilein Bank was not an agency of Sudan at the time the plaintiffs sought to attach the blocked assets. The definition is, significantly, in the past tense. As a result, under this definition and under OFAC rules, the wires did not become unblocked when Nilein Bank was allegedly privatized. The blocked funds did not cease being the “blocked assets” of an agency of Sudan because of that privatization; they would only cease to be such blocked assets when they were unblocked. Nor is their any conceivable reason why Congress would want to create, as the Court did, a class of blocked assets of unblocked parties that are somehow exempt from the TRIA.

Permalink Comments Off on Federal Judge Protects Banks from Injured Sailors and Widows

Bookmark and Share


Copyright © 2017 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
(No republication, syndication or use permitted without my consent.)

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »