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Archive for October, 2014

Oct

13

Itâ€™s DÃ©jÃ Vu All Over Again All Over Again

Posted by Clif Burns at 11:50 am on October 13, 2014

Category: Anti-Boycott • BIS

McWane Pipes via http://www.mcwanepipe.com/upl/images/homepage/51269ef106307116cac-a9f28ef2.jpg [Fair Use] The best job at the Bureau of Industry and Security is, without question, working at the Office of Antiboycott Compliance (“OAC”) because all their cases are pretty much the exact same thing, leaving plenty of time to finish the daily crossword puzzle and read the sports pages. If you don’t believe me that they are all the same, just look at the latest enforcement action from OAC against McWane International, an Alabama company that manufacturers water pipes. McWane agreed to a $7,000 fine for providing a certificate that a ship was “allowed by Arab authorities to call at Arabian ports” and failing to report documentary requirements in a letter of credit for a certificate from the “owner, carrier or captain of the vessel or their agent” that the ship could call in Arab ports.

Regular readers of this blog, which obviously did not include anyone at McWane, will immediately see the problems with these certifications. Under BIS rules such certifications can only be made by the “owner, charterer, or master” of the ship. It can’t be made by McWane (which was none of the above) or by an “agent” of the “owner, charterer, or master.” We’ve talked about this identicalÂ issue at length here and here.

Fortunately the fine is only $7,000, well below an amount that might lead anyone to challenge the dubious statutory authority of the Office of Antiboycott Compliance to even exist. Disagreements over the antiboycott provisions in the Export Administration Act were one of the reasons that the act lapsed. Whether in that context the existence of the Arab boycott is a national emergency authorizing the President to extend the antiboycott provisions under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (“IEEPA”) is highly questionable.

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Oct

8

Intel Sub Fined for Encryption Exports

Posted by Clif Burns at 9:14 pm on October 8, 2014

Category: BIS • Encryption

Wind River Convention Booth via https://twitter.com/WindRiver/media [Fair Use] The Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) announced today that it had convinced Wind River, an Intel subsidiary, to pay a whopping $750,000 to settle charges that it exported products with encryption functionality without required licenses. There were also four unlicensed exports of the items to parties on the BIS Entity List. Â This is the first announced fine (at least to my knowledge) involving encryption exports, and it has created a bit of a stir among those of us who handle encryption export matters.

Basically the encryption rules try to prevent the export of technology that every twelve-year-old in Estonia already has. Door to empty barn, meet escaping horses; escaping horses, meet door to empty barn. It is a not-so-well-kept secret that the encryption rules are not really there to protect sensitive U.S. technology but as a means to permit the NSA to see who is using what encryption where in order to better snoop on everyone using encryption.

As usual, details are scarce in the settlement documents as to what exactly went on, with the documents simply saying that Wind River exported items classified as 5D002 to government end users in China, Hong Kong, Russia, Israel, South Africa and South Korea. A little snooping of our own showed that the items involved, mostly real time operating systems, were classified by Wind River as 5D002 “ENC restricted.” All ENC restricted items require licenses to government end users in countries other than those countries listed in Supplement 3 to Part 740 of the EAR. The countries involved in the exports at issue are not Supp. 3 countries and, hence, required a license.

The BIS press release justified the size of the fine, despite Wind River’s voluntary disclosure of the violation, because it would “serve as a reminder to companies of their responsibility to know their customers and, when using license exceptions, to ensure their customers are eligible recipients.” This suggests that Wind River’s problemsÂ may have arisenÂ because it was dealing with entities that it did not realize were government end users.

However the BIS definition of government end users is hardly a model of clarity:

A government end-user is any foreign central, regional or local government department, agency, or other entity performing governmental functions; including governmental research institutions, governmental corporations or their separate business units (as defined in part 772 of the EAR) which are engaged in the manufacture or distribution of items or services controlled on the Wassenaar Munitions List. â€¦

Consider the portion of the definition that includes “governmental corporations or their separate business units (as defined in part 772 of the EAR) which are engaged in the manufacture or distribution of items or services controlled on the Wassenaar Munitions List.” Â For starters, does the qualifier “engaged in manufacture â€¦ of items â€¦ on the Wassenaar Munitions List” qualify just “separate business units” or both “governmental corporations” and “separate business units”? And what are government corporations? Companies that have a government charter but private ownership? Companies that have a significant percentage owned by the government? Private companies given a government monopoly and that perform a traditional government function? Who knows? But if you get it wrong, expect to be fined by BIS and to be the object of a snide comment that it’s your own darn fault for not figuring out that the company was a government corporation under an essentially meaningless definition.

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Oct

7

De Minimis Rule? What De Minimis Rule?

Posted by Clif Burns at 10:40 pm on October 7, 2014

Category: BIS • Criminal Penalties • Syria

Robbins & Myers Belgium HQ via Google Maps http://goo.gl/P9oIwo [Fair Use]
ABOVE: Robbins & Meyers Belgium

Robbins & Myers Belgium, a Belgian subsidiary of Robbins & Myers, Inc., which was recently acquired by National Oilwell Varco, pleaded guilty last week to charges that it violated U.S. sanctions on Syria when it exported stators that it manufactured in Belgium to Syria. According to the Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) press release, the Belgian company was charged with violating U.S. criminal law because of the following:

The guilty plea stemmed from actions by Robbins & Myers Belgium that, in 2006, caused four illegal exports, reexports and/or transshipments of statorsâ€”important components of oil extraction equipmentâ€”that had made [sic] from steel that had been milled in the United States to a customer operating oil fields in Syria.

Say what? Is it really criminal for a foreign company to export an item just because it has some U.S. content in it? What happened to the de minimis rule? How hard would it be to say that the item consisted of more than 10 percent U.S.-origin steel to avoid suggesting that the export was illegal if there was any U.S. content? Â Even though BIS used up three paragraphs in the press release patting itself on the back, it could not manage to add a sentence somewhere, anywhere, to correct this misstatement of the law?

The factual proffer that served as a basis for the guilty plea, which is supposed to contain facts sufficient to support the plea, is no better on this issue.

At all times pertinent to this case, the stators shipped by RMB to Company A in Syria were made from steel tube that Company B had milled in the United States.

Nope, being “made from steel tube â€¦ milled in the United States” is not enough to support the plea. Section 746.9(a) of the BIS rules forbids exports to Syria of items “subject to the EAR.” And section 734.3(c)(1), otherwise known as the de minimis rule, states that foreign-made items destined for Syria are not “subject to the EAR” if they contain “controlled U.S.-origin commodities â€¦ valued at 10% or less of the total value of the foreign-made commodity.” Although the rule is not clear, BIS takes the position that “controlled” here means “controlled for Syria” under section 746.9 and therefore includes any EAR99 item other than food or medicine. Â Under that reading the EAR99 steel tubes would be controlled U.S.-origin commodities for purposes of the de minimis rule. We just don’t know if the tubes were more than 10 percent of the value of the foreign-made stators. And we don’t know this because the supposedly completely proffer leaves out this crucial element of the crime.

I do not doubt that in fact the U.S.-origin content here was in excess of de minimis as required by the rule for foreign-made products. My point is, however, that the BIS press release and the proffer incorrectly and misleadingly state that a criminal violation occurred because the stators contained any amount of U.S. origin goods. That is simply not a correct statement of the law, and those charged with enforcing the law should also correctly state it.

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Oct

2

Newest Sanctions Crime: Buying a Condo while Iranian-American

Posted by Clif Burns at 11:12 pm on October 2, 2014

Category: Iran Sanctions • OFAC

By Don-vip (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AU.S_Treasury_Department_in_Washington%2C_D.C..jpg One of the possibly unintended consequences of the heavy fines imposed on banks by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) for violations of the vaguely and confusingly written Iran sanctions regulations is that banks overreact, exhibiting a Pavlovian response to anything with the word Iran involved and blindly blocking everything in sight. As a result, Iranian-Americans often have a difficult and unpredictable relationship with their own banks here in the United States. As recently reported by the Arizona Republic, Neda Tavassoli, an Iranian-American, had difficulty closing her purchase of a condominium when one of the banks involved needlessly blocked the account holding her funds for the down payment.

The story begins, improbably enough, when her ex-husband, who is also a U.S. citizen, was visiting his family in Iran and checked their joint account from a computer in Iran. The bank then froze that account. Subsequently the bank even froze an unrelated escrow account to which Ms. Tavassoli’s parents, also U.S. citizens, wired the down payment for the condo in issue. Neither Ms. Tavassoli, her ex-husband, Â her parents nor the U.S. bank from which the parents wired the funds are on the SDN list, so there is no conceivableÂ reason for these accounts to be blocked. None of these parties are even in Iran so there was not even a reason to reject the wire transfer to the escrow account, much less to block it.

Most importantly, checking the account from Iran, which got the whole business started, would not serve as a basis for blocking the account. Whether the bank broke any rules by providing the information back to Iran in response to the account query depends on whether that communication was “incident to the exchange of personal communications over the Internet” and therefore permitted by section 560.540 of the Iran regulations. But even if the exception in section 560.540 for Internet communications does not apply, the proper response by the bank was simply not to respond to the request, not to block the account.

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