The international Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recently issued two announcements updating the list of countries and jurisdictions at high risk of money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing, and...more
Following a meeting of the Council of the European Union on 17 October 2023, the British Virgin Islands (“BVI”) was removed from the EU list of non-cooperative jurisdictions for tax purposes (Annex I), the EU’s so-called...more
Our October update includes a significant Supreme Court decision on how to treat historic underpayments of holiday pay, a preliminary tribunal hearing on whether a belief in race equality that opposed critical race theory was...more
Anti-boycott rules are one of the lesser raised issues across clients involved in international trade or in servicing those movements, but the issue does arise. The rules originated in the Export Administration Act of 1979...more
On 14 February, the EU Council added four jurisdictions (the British Virgin Islands, Costa Rica, Marshall Islands and Russia) to the list of non-cooperative jurisdictions (Annex I) (the “EU Blacklist”)....more
On 12 January 2023 the Spanish Ministry of Finance published a draft of its long-awaited list of non-cooperative jurisdictions. Spain has finally not followed the EU approach with some jurisdictions. The draft Spanish list...more
On October 5, 2022, the Department of Defense (DOD), in compliance with Section 889 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, released an updated list (Blacklist) of banned People’s Republic of China...more
Designed for busy in-house counsel, compliance professionals, and anti-corruption lawyers, this newsletter summarizes some of the most important international anti-corruption law and case developments from the past month,...more
Foreign investments in Israel have skyrocketed in recent years. By the end of 2020, foreign residents’ direct investments in Israel exceeded USD 185 billion, nearly a 15% increase over 2019. Foreign investments offer...more
We are delighted to bring this edition of Spotlight Magazine to you after the disruption of the past two years and the COVID-19 pandemic. There has been a sea of regulatory change that has evolved during this time, masked by...more
Last week, in part one of our two-part Summer Forecast of labor and employment-related legislative and agency developments, the Buzz took a look at the U.S. Congress and what our legislators might have in store for employers...more
EEOC, DOJ Issue Guidance on AI in the Workplace. - On May 12, 2022, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) each issued guidance documents addressing potential...more
It’s 7:00pm on a Friday, and it’s also the last day of your company’s fiscal quarter. You’re the shipping department manager responsible for loading several crates of widgets onto a truck that will take them to JFK Int’l...more
Ostensibly as part of a comprehensive overhaul of its acquisition regulations, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has proposed resurrecting the contractor blacklisting rule, which was overturned by Congress under the...more
Finally: Congress Passes 2022 Government Funding Legislation. This week, Congress passed a $1.5 trillion omnibus funding bill (H.R. 2471), setting the table to fully fund the federal government for the remainder of fiscal...more
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on February 17, 2022, seeking to update its contract acquisition requirements. Within the proposed rulemaking, the USDA included two...more
On February 17, 2022, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking updating USDA’s Agriculture Acquisition Regulation (AGAR), the agency’s counterpart to the Federal Acquisition...more
How can we allow open access to sophisticated tools that can attack anyone’s phones undetected? It seems like creating tools that can only be used for illegal and immoral purposes should be banned by society. ...more
The Dutch data protection authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens or AP) has rejected the license application of a Dutch association of small and medium enterprises (VODIOM associations) to keep a blacklist of possible...more
Colorado recently enacted a blacklisted country approach to thwarting perceived state tax abuses by multinational companies. Will it withstand constitutional challenges? Matt Hunsaker gives his two cents....more
The U.S. government officially removed Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp. from its blacklist, ending the Trump-era ban prohibiting Americans from investing in the company. In their joint filing in the U.S. District Court...more
Bad-faith trademark filings can pose a painful obstacle to brand owners’ attempts to register and enforce trademark rights in China. Traditionally, trademark owners have needed to file a broad range of defensive applications,...more
The Digitalization Act, which entered into force on January 19, 2021, substantially extends the scope of German antitrust law to tackle presumed enforcement challenges in the digital economy and raises merger control...more
In late March 2020, we published a note regarding the de-facto “downgrade” of the Cayman Islands by the European Union’s Economic and Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN) as a “non-cooperative jurisdiction” for tax purposes....more
The European Council has announced its decision to remove the Cayman Islands from the EU list of non-cooperative jurisdictions for tax purposes. In February we reported on Cayman’s inclusion on the list and our expectation...more