On April 9, 2021, the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) published a final rule (“Final Rule”) in the Federal Register to add seven Chinese parties (together, the “Designees”) to the Entity List. The Final Rule took effect on April 8, 2021. According to the Final Rule and the Commerce Department’s press release, the Designees were added to the Entity List because they have procured US-origin items for use in building supercomputers…
On March 2, 2021, the US Government imposed a series of new measures against Russian Government officials and entities in response to the alleged poisoning and subsequent imprisonment of Russian opposition politician Aleksey Navalny. Specifically, the US State Department (“State”) imposed a number of financial sanctions and export restrictions on Russia; the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) within the US Treasury Department designated seven Russian officials to the List of Specially Designated Nationals and…
On January 15, 2021, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) published an interim final rule (“Rule”) amending various provisions of the Export Administration Regulations (“EAR”) to implement certain provisions of the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 (“ECRA”). Among other things further outlined below, the Rule imposes new restrictions on specific activities of US persons. By way of brief background, the EAR generally controls transactions involving US origin items (i.e., goods, software, technology)…
On January 19, 2021, the Trump administration issued Executive Order 13984 (“EO 13984”), “Taking Additional Steps To Address the National Emergency With Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities” which amends and expands Executive Order 13694 of April 1, 2015, to detect and deter the use of US infrastructure as a service (“IaaS”) products by foreign malicious cyber actors. Specifically, EO 13984 directs the US Department of Commerce (“Commerce”) to (i) issue regulations to detect and…