As we reported back in January of this year, in a sort of Christmas amnesty, the Bureau of Industry and Security(“BIS”) freed all current prisoners on the Unverified List (“UVL”) and announced that it was building a bigger and more uncomfortable jail for the next set of UVL inmates. Under the rules of the new jail, all exports to parties on the UVL, regardless of the value of the export, would require an AES filing. If the export to the UVL party required a license, no license exceptions could be used. And, most importantly, UVL parties would have to sign a lengthy statement promising to obey the Export Administration Regulations, revealing the end use and end user of the item (including the address,  favorite ethnic food and Facebook password for each end user), committing to cooperate in all future end use checks and swearing on a religious book of choice that they would be home and in bed by 9:00 p.m. every night, no exceptions. (I exaggerate, of course, but the required statement is lengthy, contains most of the things I’ve listed and must be signed even if the U.S. exporter is planning to send a set of steak knives or other EAR99 item to the UVL party.)

On Monday, the gates of the new prison opened and 29 new UVL inmates were welcomed to the new and improved UVL correctional facility. I scanned the list and did not see any former entities on the UVL on this new list, although it’s possible I might have missed a few. The announcement of the new list does not reveal the particular crimes committed by each entity on the list but under BIS rules they would have had to have failed an end-use check in one way or other, either by not submitting to it, not being where they were supposed to be, or not being able to explain what happened to an item previously exported to them.

Five Russian companies were added to the UVL, and this was probably unconnected to recent sanctions on Russia over the Crimea and Ukraine issues. Given that BIS has suspended issuing licenses for Russia, being on the list may be somewhat more burdensome for the Russian parties.  Although licenses might in theory be available as a fall-back option to UVL parties outside Russia who could no longer use license exceptions, this fall-back option will not be available to the Russian entities on the UVL.