On November 17, 2020, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (“OFAC”) amended General License (“GL”) 8F and re-issued it as General License 8G. GL 8G extends the validity period of certain limited maintenance and wind-down transactions and activities involving Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (“PdVSA”) until June 3, 2021. Our blog posts describing previous amendments to the general license are available here, here, here, and here. Specifically, GL 8G extends the validity period of the authorization…
On October 26, 2020, the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) designated additional Iranian individuals, entities and vessels to the Specifically Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (the “SDN” List) pursuant to Executive Order 13224 (as amended) (“EO 13224”), a counter-terrorism authority, for their support to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (“IRGC-QF”), an entity designated under EO 13224. Among the designated entities are the Iranian Ministry of Petroleum, the…
On August 27, 2020, the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) issued a final rule (“Final Rule”) adding 24 Chinese state-owned entities to the Entity List (the “SCS Designees”), including several subsidiaries of China Communications Construction Company (“CCCC”), due to their ties to land reclamation efforts involving artificial islands in the South China Sea. In a press statement released with the designations, the Commerce Department cited the role played by the SCS…
On August 17, 2020, the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) issued a final rule (“Final Rule”) (i) expanding the Export Administration Regulations (“EAR”) General Prohibition Three (the foreign-produced direct product rule, or the “FPDP Rule”) to further restrict Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and its affiliates designated on the BIS Entity List (collectively, “Huawei”) from acquiring foreign-produced semiconductors that are the direct product of certain US software and technology, (ii) removing the…