ABOVE: Nalinee Taveesin

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Any U.S. companies doing business with the Thai government are going to have to exercise some additional caution after Thailand’s Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra appointed Nalinee Taveesin as PM’s Office Minister. Ms. Taveesin is on the SDN List maintained by the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”). U.S. persons are forbidden by law to engage in any transactions with individuals on the SDN List.

Ms. Taveesin was placed on the list because of her alleged involvement in various transactions with Grace Mugabe, the wife of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe. Taveesin claims it’s all a huge misunderstanding, that she never was involved in any business deals with Grace Mugabe, and that she merely had become friends with Grace Mugabe when she came to Thailand for a New Year’s holiday vacation.

The issue now is whether Ms. Taveesin’s presence on the SDN list has any impact on business deals with the Thai government in which she may be involved. The SDN list would seemingly bar transactions with her both in her private and in her official capacity. OFAC has, at least in the case of the Palestinian Authority, held that the presence of sanctioned individuals in a government agency or body could prevent transactions with the government agency itself, effectively eliminating any notion that someone can be sanctioned vis-à-vis their private activities but not their official governmental activities.

I’ll have to be honest and say that I have no idea what the PM’s Office Minister in Thailand does, but U.S. businesses doing business with the government of Thailand should be wary and make sure that Ms. Taveesin has no connection with, or involvement in, the transaction.

A spokesman for the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) told Export Law Blog this morning that discussions between OFAC and the North Pole over Santa Claus’s Christmas Eve itinerary had broken down and were not expected to be resumed before Santa’s scheduled departure on December 24 at 10 pm EST.

The dispute arose from a dilemma that the U.S. sanctions against Cuba posed for Santa’s planned delivery of toys to children in Cuba. If Santa delivers toys for U.S. children first, there will be toys destined for Cuba in the sleigh in violation of 31 C.F.R. § 515.207(b). That rule prohibits Santa’s sleigh from entering the United States with “goods in which Cuba or a Cuban national has an interest.” On the other hand, if Santa delivers the toys to Cuban children first, then 31 C.F.R. § 515.207(a) prohibits the sleigh from entering the United States and “unloading freight for a period of 180 days from the date the vessel departed from a port or place in Cuba.”

A press release from the North Pole announced that the OFAC rules left Santa no choice but to bypass the children of the United States this Christmas. A spokesman from OFAC warned that if Santa attempted to overfly the United States, his sleigh would be forced to land and his cargo seized. He continued:

We know that the outcome is harsh, but we cannot allow Fidel Castro’s regime to continue to be propped up by Santa’s annual delivery of valuable Christmas toys to Cuban children.

Congressional leaders did not return our calls.

This post is an annual tradition and appeared previously in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 in slightly altered form. Export Law Blog would like to take the opportunity of this post to extend its best holiday wishes to all of its readers. Posting will be light between now and the end of the holidays.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this story of a Fulbright scholar in Norway who appears to get caught up in an OFAC-screening imbroglio and can’t pay her rent. Fortunately, the problem mysteriously disappeared before she winds up sleeping in Oslo’s famed Frogner Park.

The student was trying to wire money to herself from her account in the United States when she was told by her bank that the funds were blocked and that perhaps she should take a gander at the SDN list. She did that and, unable to find her name on the list, optimistically wrote to OFAC for some assistance. (Hey, I heard you back there. Stop snickering at the poor idealistic student.)

Miraculously enough she gets an anonymous response from OFAC, asking for more information, which she sends.

Two days later comes another message from OFAC, this time signed by “Michael Z.” Like Afghans, or spies, he evidently has only one name, but my hopes that he might be an actual person inexplicably rise anyway — only to sink again when he claims OFAC needs yet more information. All this so that Michael Z., presumed person, may help me “more effectively.” (More than what, I wonder?) He is, he insists, trying to locate my money with the help of my bank, which by the way is now blocking me from seeing information about my own account online.

Somewhat later, without explanation, the student’s funds are unblocked, giving a happy, if not particularly satisfying, ending to this odd story.

But here’s the rub. I haven’t mentioned her name yet. I haven’t done so on purpose. This story might make sense if her name was something like Aisha Qadhafi. But it wasn’t. It was Ann Jones.