The United Kingdom’s Export Control Organization has launched a newsletter, pithily titled “Compliance Newsletter.” In its premier four-page issue, we learn that the ECO is big on warning letters, boasting that it has issued 50 of them since establishing procedures for warning letters a year ago.

The newsletter also notes that an unnamed company agreed to settle export charges for £575,000 ($880,000). The newsletter’s description of the settlement is a treasure trove of useful information:

In April 2009, a UK company paid a compound penalty of £575,000 for alleged offences in relation to the export of controlled goods to a number of sensitive destinations without licences between 2003 and 2006.
 
Compounding is the means by which HMRC can settle out of court a case which would normally be prosecuted to save both the tax payer and the company time and legal fees.

That’s it. Those 66 words are the entire entry on the settlement, or about £8,700 ($13,000) per word. There is no mention of the identity of the company, the goods exported, the number of exports, the destinations, or the value of the goods. This blog often complains about the paucity of information given by U.S. export agencies in announcements of export settlements, but in comparison to the ECO’s stingy announcement, the U.S agencies are releasing disclosures the length of a 17th century epistolary novel — OFAC, perhaps, excluded.

In fact, the monthly newsletter of the East Anglia Society for the Protection of Water Voles and Stoats is longer and packed with more information than the ECO’s new newsletter.

At 11:30 this morning, an unidentified caller rang me and said that he was responsible for the blog that I discussed yesterday that principally consisted of posts copied in their entirety from this blog. The man on the other end of the line told me that he meant no harm, that he thought this was a permissible use of this blog’s RSS feed, and that he would remove my posts from his site, which he has done.

Intrigued by why a steadfastly anonymous individual would be trying to run an export compliance blog in an obvious attempt to garner export compliance business, I asked him directly who he was, and he declined to identify himself. I asked him why he didn’t want to identify himself. “I’d rather not say,” was the response. He did indicate that the purpose of his blog was “to generate email leads” and that it had been successful in doing that. And he sent me an email from a gmail account using a misspelled pseudonym (“Herbert Bloomffield”), confirming that he had deleted my posts.

All of this faux cloak-and-dagger stuff — Ukrainian pornographers, anonymous phone calls, pseudonymous emails — suggests to me that Mr. “Bloomffield” was being far from straightforward in his proclamation of naive innocence. And the next time this fellow wants to put on his Maxwell Smart cap and make a call from his shoe phone, he might remember that there are these marvelous technologies called Caller ID and reverse lookups on the Internet. Throughout my conversation with Mr. “Bloomffield,” there was the name of his (large) export compliance company on my telephone display. A telephone number was displayed too. A reverse-lookup showed that number belonged to the company shown on the telephone Caller ID display.

Now that I know who the caller was and where he was calling from, it’s perfectly clear that Mr. “Bloomffield” knew what he was doing and knew that what he was doing was questionable, both legally and ethically. He just didn’t want his company — with more than 100 employees and well-known probably to most, if not all, of the readers of this blog — connected with Ukrainian pornography sites, RSS feed scraping, and the use of someone else’s work to generate business for his own company.

Oh, and just so Mr. “Bloomffield” knows that I’m not bluffing about knowing who he really is, I just filled out a contact form on his website asking to be sent information on his company.

UPDATE: The culpable employee has now identified himself in an email to me, indicating that his company was in no way involved in this purloined blog affair. He appears to have been an overzealous sales person looking for leads.

The United States Postal Service published in today’s Federal Register a notice of a proposed modification to its privacy regulations. One of the modifications relates to customs declarations that postal customers supply to the USPS in connection with exports made by those customers using the USPS. According to the notice, the USPS is proposing to give those declarations for “certain mailpieces” to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”), apparently pursuant to a specific request from OFAC.

Needless to say, the notice doesn’t explicitly describe those “certain mailpieces” for which OFAC has requested the Customs Declaration. But a tantalizing clue suggests that only mail to Iran is involved. The notice references three executive orders imposing sanctions: E.O 12957,
E.O.12959, and E.O 13059. Each of these orders promulgates sanctions on Iran. Beyond that, we have little indication of which postal shipments to Iran are subject to this disclosure proposal.

Two minor things are of additional interest regarding the USPS notice. First, the USPS refers to OFAC throughout as “the OFAC,” which, however quaint, suggests that “the” USPS doesn’t have much dealing with OFAC which, for whatever reason, normally doesn’t have the definite article prepended to its acronym in the same way it precedes USPS. Also the contact point for the notice is a USPS employee with a literary name: Jane Eyre. That’s pretty cool, but a contact named Clarissa Harlowe would have been even cooler on a USPS notice.

Last Friday President Obama renewed the national emergency with respect to Syria. This action allows the current sanctions against Syria to continue for another year. The previous declaration of emergency was scheduled to expire on Sunday. Current sanctions, among other things, prohibit all exports to Syria other than food and medicine.

During Friday’s daily press briefing at the Department of State, acting spokesman Robert Wood explained the President’s logic in renewing the sanctions:

[T]he President felt it was necessary to take these measures. These are not new sanctions, and there is still – I think this shows you that we still have some very serious concerns about Syrian behavior and activity in the world. We’ve said to you before our concerns about what Syria is doing in Iraq, its support for terrorist groups.

When questioned about how to square the extension of the emergency and the attendant sanctions with talks between White House envoy Jeffrey Feltman and the Syrian government currently taking place, Wood had this to say:

We have very serious concerns about Syrian behavior. I think you all understand that very clearly, and those haven’t gone away. But what we’re saying is instead of isolating Syria, we’re willing to engage them.

Syria, for its part, declined to read any special significance into the renewal of the sanctions, describing it as “routine.”