Conservation groups Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity took to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to ask the Department of Energy to reverse its approval of exports to be shipped from the Alaska liquefied natural gas project. The decision, which approves LNG shipments from Alaska's North Slope to Asia, failed to fully assess the project's "climate and environmental harms," the center said in a press release.
The Bureau of Industry and Security last week revoked export privileges of one person for illegally exporting diving technology equipment from the U.S. and four people for illegally exporting firearms and ammunition.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York set a plea proceeding for former FBI agent Charles McGonigal in a case charging him with violating U.S. sanctions on Russia. Judge Jennifer Rearden set the Aug. 15 proceeding on word that McGonigal "may wish to enter" a guilty plea (U.S. v. Charles McGonigal, S.D.N.Y. # 23-00016).
Rhode Island resident Robert Alcantara pleaded guilty to conspiring to traffic in firearms after planning to sell more than 100 “ghost guns” to people in the Dominican Republic, DOJ announced this month. DOJ said Alcantara used his home as a factory to turn gun kits into ghost guns, which have no serial numbers and are untraceable. Alcantara received payments for some gun exports to the Dominican Republic and laundered those funds. He faces a maximum five-year prison sentence for conspiring to traffic firearms and a maximum 20-year sentence for conspiring to launder money.
A former oil and commodities trader at Vitol Inc., Javier Aguilar Morales, was charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by bribing Mexican officials to obtain and retain business for Vitol. According to the indictment filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas on Aug. 3, Aguilar violated the FCPA via bribery and money laundering from 2017 to 2020 to keep business for Vitol with the Mexican state-owned oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), and its subsidiary, PEMEX Procurement International (United States v. Javier Aguilar, S.D. Tex. #4:23-00335).
The State Department this week announced penalties on one person and four entities and their subsidiaries for illegal transfers under the Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act. The agency in a notice said the parties transferred items subject to multilateral control lists that contribute to weapons proliferation or missile production. The State Department barred them from making certain purchases of items controlled on the U.S. Munitions List and by the Arms Export Control Act and will suspend any current export licenses used by the entities. The agency also will bar them from receiving new export licenses for any goods subject to the Export Administration Regulations. The restrictions will remain in place for two years from the July 19 effective date.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed a case against a United Arab Emirates cigarette filter and tear tape manufacturer following a more than $660,000 settlement agreement with the government for violating U.S. sanctions against North Korea . Essentra FZE Company Limited exported cigarette filter rods to North Korea and did not voluntarily disclose the violations, which the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control said constituted an egregious case (U.S. v. Essentra FZE Company, Dist. D.C. # 20-112).
Two U.S. Navy servicemembers, Jinchao Wei and Wenheng Zhao, were arrested in California as part of two separate cases for "transmitting sensitive military information" to China, DOJ announced Aug. 3.
Investors in Mississippi's public employees' retirement system sued Seagate Technology Holdings for deceiving its investors and causing them to buy Seagate stock at "artificially inflated prices" related to its conduct in illegally exporting hard disk drives to China. (Public Employees' Retirement System of Mississippi v. Seagate Technology Holdings, N.D. Cal. # 3:23-03711).
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in a July opinion, reversed a California district court's decision acquitting Yi-Chi Shih, an employee at China-based firm Chengdu RML, of conspiracy to violate export control laws via his export of semiconductors to China. Judges Andrew Hurwitz and Ryan Nelson said "a rational factfinder could find that the exported [monolithic microwave integrated circuits] were not exempt from the [Export Administration Regulations] as fundamental research."