Japan is unsure about the details of South Korea’s decision to remove Japan’s preferential trade status, a Japanese official said, but thinks the move won’t have much of an impact.

The State Department announced sanctions on Zhuhai Zhenrong, China’s state-owned oil company, for buying petroleum from Iran, according to a notice in the Aug. 15 Federal Register. The sanctions -- which target the company and Youmin Li, its executive director and general manager -- take effect Sept. 16.

One of the top concerns of the U.S. firearms industry is the delay in transitioning export controls of firearms and ammunition from the State Department to the Commerce Department, said Larry Keane, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. As the wait for Export Control Reform has increased -- beginning in 2009 under the Obama administration and continuing under the Trump administration -- the U.S. firearms industry increasingly feels as if it has been left behind, Keane said.

Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with some of the top stories for Aug. 5-9 in case they were missed.

The Treasury Department’s most recent Venezuela-related general licenses “stop just short of a total embargo” on the country’s government, said Adrienne Braumiller, a trade lawyer and member of the Commerce Department’s Regulations and Procedures Technical Advisory Committee. Some companies will need to pay close attention to the updated expiration dates for certain general licenses, she said, and banks will be faced with a “new level of depth” to the complexity of screening their customers.

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security made several changes to its Entity List, adding, removing and modifying entries for companies in China, Canada, Malaysia, Russia, The United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and more. The changes add 17 entities to the list, modify 23 existing entries for China, Hong Kong and Russia, and remove three entities located in China and the UAE, BIS said in a notice. The changes take effect Aug. 14.

South Korea said it will remove Japan from its so-called white list of trusted trading partners in apparent retaliation for Japan’s similar announcement last week, Reuters reported Aug. 12. The removal from the list, which gives countries a “fast-track trade status,” further escalates tensions between the two countries that have been locked in a trade dispute since early July (see 1908080039).

The White House is delaying decisions on Huawei export licenses after China announced it was suspending purchases of U.S. agricultural products, Bloomberg reported Aug. 8. President Donald Trump announced in June that the U.S. planned to loosen restrictions on Huawei, but that promise was contingent on China increasing U.S. agricultural purchases, Bloomberg said. In an Aug. 1 tweet, Trump said China is not buying enough agricultural goods and announced a 10 percent tariff on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods.

China's newly announced Shanghai Free Trade Zone will continue “regardless” of its trade relationship with the U.S., China’s Vice Commerce Minister and top trade negotiator Wang Shouwen said during an Aug. 6 press conference, according to an unofficial translation of a transcript from it.

The Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee appears to be among the advisory committees that aren't eligible for elimination under a recent executive order. President Donald Trump issued an executive order in June that directed all federal departments and agencies to eliminate one-third of their current Federal Advisory Committee Act-authorized committees by Sept. 30 (see 1906170021). Committees authorized by statute aren't eligible for elimination and, according to a search on the FACA database, there are 22 trade-focused committees that are required by statute.