An affordable price is probably the major benefit persuading people to buy drugs at www.americanbestpills.com. The cost of medications in Canadian drugstores is considerably lower than anywhere else simply because the medications here are oriented on international customers. In many cases, you will be able to cut your costs to a great extent and probably even save up a big fortune on your prescription drugs. What's more, pharmacies of Canada offer free-of-charge shipping, which is a convenient addition to all other benefits on offer. Cheap price is especially appealing to those users who are tight on a budget
Service Quality and Reputation
Although some believe that buying online is buying a pig in the poke, it is not. Canadian online pharmacies are excellent sources of information and are open for discussions. There one can read tons of users' feedback, where they share their experience of using a particular pharmacy, say what they like or do not like about the drugs and/or service. Reputable online pharmacy canadianrxon.com take this feedback into consideration and rely on it as a kind of expert advice, which helps them constantly improve they service and ensure that their clients buy safe and effective drugs. Last, but not least is their striving to attract professional doctors. As a result, users can directly contact a qualified doctor and ask whatever questions they have about a particular drug. Most likely, a doctor will ask several questions about the condition, for which the drug is going to be used. Based on this information, he or she will advise to use or not to use this medication.
Where is the U.S. Department of Treasury? Where is the White House? (rhetorical)
By the hour scandals come out of the Federal government where the reaction is: ‘it is under investigation’ or we have created a task force to advise on how to correct the issue or it was due to a computer glitch.
Never do we hear that someone is going to prison for malfeasance or theft or obstruction.
So how about putting pressure on the White House to call in the FBI, build the case and then move to a criminal case? Sounds great huh? Maybe even House of Cards will do a whole series on the waste, fraud and corruption, after all it is revenue generating right? Oh…one more thing, whistleblowers have a very short life and career span in Washington DC, but there are laws where Federal employees must comply and report waste, fraud and abuse….well so it goes.
Well back to the $125 billion, while that was only LAST year.
A number of strategies, including implementing preventive controls and addressing GAO’s prior recommendations, can help agencies reduce improper payments, which have been a persistent, government-wide issue. The improper payment estimate, attributable to 124 programs across 22 agencies in fiscal year 2014, was $124.7 billion, up from $105.8 billion in fiscal year 2013. The almost $19 billion increase was primarily due to the Medicare, Medicaid, and Earned Income Tax Credit programs, which account for over 75 percent of the government-wide improper payment estimate. Federal spending in Medicare and Medicaid is expected to significantly increase, so it is critical that actions are taken to reduce improper payments in these programs. Moreover, for fiscal year 2014, federal entities reported estimated error rates for 10 risk-susceptible programs that exceeded 10 percent. Recent laws and guidance have focused attention on improper payments, but incomplete or understated estimates and noncompliance with criteria listed in federal law hinder the government’s ability to assess the full extent of improper payments and implement strategies to reduce them. For example, for fiscal year 2014, 2 federal agencies did not report improper payment estimates for 4 risk-susceptible programs, and 5 programs with improper payment estimates greater than $1 billion were noncompliant with federal requirements for 3 consecutive years. Identifying root causes of improper payments can help agencies target corrective actions, and GAO has made numerous recommendations that could help reduce improper payments. For example, strengthening verification of Medicare providers and suppliers could help reduce improper payments. GAO has stated that continued agency attention is needed to (1) identify susceptible programs, (2) develop reliable estimation methodologies, (3) report as required, and (4) implement effective corrective actions based on root cause analysis. Absent such continued efforts, the federal government cannot be assured that taxpayer funds are adequately safeguarded. The full report is here.
A Government Accountability Office report found that the federal government racked up more than $124 billion in improper payments in 2014, $19 billion above the previous year.
The Oct. 1 report found that the surge in payments came almost exclusively from Medicare, Medicaid, and Earned Income Tax Credit programs, which account for 75 percent of improper payments across the federal government.
“Federal spending in Medicare and Medicaid is expected to significantly increase, so it is critical that actions are taken to reduce improper payments in these programs,” the report said.
Improper payments include things like overpayments, underpayments or payments made for goods and services not received.
GAO estimated that since agencies began reporting improper payments in 2003, $1 trillion in federal funding has been lost to the issue.
The report called for greater compliance from government agencies, citing findings that five federal programs with more than $1 billion in improper payments were noncompliant with federal law for three years.
U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro testified before the Senate Committee on Finance on Oct. 1 to address the report’s findings as well as GAO’s recommendations.
“Reducing improper payments is critical to safeguarding federal funds and could help achieve cost savings and improve the government’s fiscal position,” Dodaro said in testimony.
The report noted that Medicaid and Medicare accounted for $77.4 billion in improper benefits in 2014. To fix the problem, GAO suggested the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid improve Medicare automated audits, track postpayment recovery audit activities, remove Social Security numbers from Medicare cards to help prevent fraud and other reforms.
GAO recommended improving efficiency and oversight for Medicaid, including tracking liability for third-party insurers. CMS concurred with the recommendations and, in some cases, was already working on implementation plans for them.
The other big source of improper payments identified in the report was from the Earned Income Tax Credit, a refundable tax credit for low- to moderate-income earners, particularly those with children.
The report identified $17.7 billion in improper payments related to EITC, largely to due to the credit being incorrectly claimed on tax returns.
“As we have reported, a root cause of EITC noncompliance is that eligibility is determined by taxpayers themselves or their tax return preparers and that IRS’s ability to verify eligibility before issuing refunds is limited,” the report said.
Dodaro said that while the some fraud could play a role in improper EITC payments, the complexity of tax law has led to mistaken applications, which perpetuate improper payments.
“Complexity is definitely the heart of the problem here with the error rates,” he said. “We’re not suggesting they be made more complex. What we are suggesting is that Congress regulate paid tax preparers.”
Dodaro cited Oregon’s practice of regulating paid tax preparers, which originated in the 1970s, and pointed to a 2008 study that found Oregon tax returns are 72 percent more likely to be accurate than a comparable return from paid preparers in other states.
Does anyone….anyone really take some of the editorials printed by the New York Times seriously? Do the editors there even go through a committee approval process? Is J Street, the lobby group, a constant funder of the NYT’s or could it be CAIR (Council for American Islamic Relations) or could the NYT’s be in collusion with NIAC (National Iranian American Council) or could Rick Gladstone and his ‘g0-to’ experts be on additional payrolls?
Hey Rick, here is a documentary for you sir:
Maybe Gladstone is the roommate of Rashid Khalidi.
Well, read on and then you may have additional questions. Here is lies yet another example of revisionist history.
Was the White House ever in Washington, D.C.? Can we ever really know for sure? Not unless we dig under the existing structure and find indisputable archaeological evidence of the original structure, which British general Robert Ross is said—by some sources—to have torched in August, 1814.
If you find everything about the previous paragraph patently ridiculous, you are clearly not a reporter or an editor for The New York Times. This morning, the paper of record published a piece about Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, questioning whether or not it was the site of, you know, the Jewish Temple. “Historical Certainty,” the article’s headline reads, “Proves Elusive at Jerusalem’s Holiest Place.” Capping the piece is a quote from Jane Cahill, who the paper notes is not only an archaeologist but also a practicing lawyer and therefore, presumably, an expert on incontrovertible evidence. Did the ancient Jewish temple stand where the Dome of the Rock now stands? “The answer might be ‘yes,’ if the standard of proof is merely a preponderance of the evidence,” Cahill is quoted as saying, “but ‘no’ if the standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt.”
It’s hard to begin to dissect the Times’ potent blend of ignorance and malice. There’s reporter Rick Gladstone’s repulsive bad faith in continually moving back and forth in his text between the narrow question he seems to have asked Cahill and other scholars: did the Temples stand precisely on the exact spot on the Temple Mount where Aksa was built, or might they have stood, say 50 feet over? This, in addition to the idea, which Gladstone weaves in and out of the piece, that there is even the slightest credibility to the idea that “Jewish Temples” were, you know, the products of some kind of religious fever-dream that Zionists then appropriated for their own aggressive purposes.
To be fair, Gladstone’s ignorance is all-embracing. If you know anything about religious history—not Jewish, mind you, but Muslim—you know that the Dome of the Rock was built in its current spot by the Umayyad Caliphate in 692 C.E. precisely because it was sacred space and because it was the former spot of the Jewish temple, just like the Kaaba in Mecca became a shrine because of the belief (stated explicitly in chapter 2, verse 127 of the Koran) that it was built by Abraham.
But hey, never mind any of that. Never mind the physical existence of the Western Wall, which the Times mentions in passing in the fourth-to-last paragraph, even though the existence of an enormous external supporting wall directly below the site where the temple is said to have stood should sort of answer the question. Never mind plentiful Roman historical accounts of the structure built by Herod that was widely regarded as one of the wonders of the ancient world. And never mind the fact that among scholars who actually study this stuff, there is no controversy whatsoever about the existence of Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, anymore than any controversy that exists between Judaism and Islam on this point, or the fact that there is no contradiction between Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Roman or pagan sources. Don’t bother the Times with any of these facts: Just as long as it is possible to make any Jewish claim on Judaism’s holiest site seem like yet another irrational piece of fiction invented by feverish religious Jews, Zionists, and other troublemakers who are very unlike the good and logical and educated and clean Jews who read and write for the Times.
And so, because the paper of record won’t put it clearly, permit me the pleasure: Denying that a Jewish temple stood on the Temple Mount is not a form of historical argument. It is akin to denying that the earth is not flat. Or denying that global warming is real. Or that the evidence of human evolution is widely accepted by scholars. As far as history goes, it’s the equivalent of blowing up statues of the Buddha, or blowing up churches, or denying that the Holocaust ever happened. It’s an form of denialism, which seeks to obliterate evidence and basic standards of evidence in the service of some higher truth, which is rarely anything that the future is ever thankful for. It’s ugly. Paying lip-service to standards of historical proof while wildly mis-characterizing the views of scholars in the service of historical denialism turns the Times‘ basic ignorance here into something much uglier.
“I’m continuing to learn about the details of the new Trans-Pacific Partnership, including looking hard at what’s in there to crack down on currency manipulation, which kills American jobs, and to make sure we’re not putting the interests of drug companies ahead of patients and consumers,” she said in a statement. “But based on what I know so far, I can’t support this agreement.”
At the end of the segment of Senator Rand Paul this week with Bret Baier on Fox, Paul describes some of the classified maneuvers of the TPP.
One particular group, left leaning for sure is WikiLeaks, who has been an interesting champion of trying to get all the details on the Transpacific Partnership Part.
The idea behind the TPP is free trade – amongst the member states, it aims to lower trade barriers, create a common standard for intellectual property, enforce labour and environmental law standards and promote economic growth.
Others have criticised the more stringent intellectual property laws it would introduce, which could extend copyright terms and mean harsher penalties for file-sharers.
A number of trade unions and economists, such as Joseph Stiglitz, have said the agreement “serves the interest of the wealthiest”, and caters to the needs of corporations rather than the citizens of member nations.
Concerns have also been raised over the effect it could have on the cost of medicines – by extending the intellectual property rights of certain branded drugs, delays in the development of cheaper, ‘generic’ versions of these drugs could ensue, potentially leading to poorer people having to wait much longer than the wealthy to get access to the newest medicines.
The chapter on these intellectual property issues is what has been leaked by Wikileaks, and is one of the more controversial chapters in the whole agreement.
Peter Maybarduk, the program director at Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines, said that if the TPP is ratified, “people in the Pacific-Rim countries would have to live by the rules of this leaked text.”
“The new monopoly rights for big pharmaceutical firms would compromise access to medicines in TPP countries. The TPP would cost lives.”
The document, dated 5 October, was apparently produced on the day it was announced that the 12 member states to the treaty had reached an agreement after five and a half years of negotiations.
The nations of Vietnam, Peru, Mexico, Malaysia, Japan, Canada, Australia, USA, Singapore, New Zealand, Chile and Brunei are all prospective member states to the free-trade agreement, between them representing over 40 per cent of the world economy.
Despite the leak, the final text of the TPP is reportedly being held until after the Canadian general election, on 19 October.
While, as Wikileaks says, there still needs to a be a final “legal scrub” of the document before it is finished, negotiations on the document between signatories have now ended.
Going back to 2012, Congress held hearings on how the United States is losing the cyber espionage war. To date, there has been no ground gained outside of the scope of creating more task forces and adding cyber personnel. To stop the intrusions by China, Russia and Iran has been a failure.
For a report on the major hacks in 2014, go here. This is by no means a complete list of corporations but it does give a view into the depth of the cyber threat.
WASHINGTON: The United States is “losing the cyber espionage war” against China, Russia and other countries, but even in the face of such a grave threat the country cannot agree on how to protect its precious intellectual seed capital from these predations, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee says.
China is stealing intellectual property on a massive scale, as Gen. Keith Alexander, head of both the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, has made clear with his estimates of such thefts topping $1 trillion. While China is not alone, U.S government officials have made clear that no country engages in cyber espionage as systematically, as thoroughly or as broadly as does the People’s Republic of China.
“China is investing hugely in this technology,” Rogers notes. And the impact of that investment is felt not only in the economic sphere, important as that is. Cyber is now an integral of military planning and operations, as the Russians have demonstrated several times.
To help stem those thefts and to protect critical infrastructure such as power grids, Rogers and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, his Democratic colleague on the HPSCI, met with hundreds of business leaders, civil rights and privacy groups over several months as they began to craft what became their 13-page bill. It would have offered businesses liabliity insurance in return for their agreeing to share threat information with the government. The government also would have shared threat information with the businesses.
But there was a catch. Because of how sensitive sources and methods are in the cyber world, the businesses would have to get top secret clearance for senior officials, build and maintain a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), and maintain the physical and bureaucratic complex required of anyone dealing with classified information.
As Rogers put it, his committee had offered industry a “carrot and a stick.” But his colleagues in the Senate wanted to chart a different path, so the Rogers-Ruppersberger bill is on life support. I asked him today what he planned to do with his “dead” bill. “All is not lost. I am reaching out to members of the Senate just to see what our options are,” as is Ruppersberger. “We are not giving up.”
WashingtonTimes: Iranian hackers are suspected of operating a network of bogus LinkedIn accounts that security researchers believe is part of a campaign targeting employees of corporations in the Middle East.
By creating phony profiles containing fabricated job histories and endorsements from other concocted accounts, researchers at Dell said this week that a group of hackers, likely acting on behalf of Iran, attempted to collect intelligence from legitimate LinkedIn users employed in the Arabian and African telecommunications and defense industries. Twenty-five fake LinkedIn accounts have been identified by researchers working for the company’s SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit, including those of supposed recruitment consultants with hundreds of connections apiece, Dell said on Wednesday.
“CTU researchers assess with high confidence the purpose of this network is to target potential victims through social engineering,” Dell said in the latest report, referring to a tactic in which sensitive data becomes compromised when an individual reveals information to an attacker, often under false pretenses.
Dell has named the actors “Threat Group-2889” and said it’s likely the same organization dubbed “Operation Cleaver” in a report released last year by Cylance, a security firm that linked the group to Iran and claimed it was working to undermine the security of over 50 companies across 15 industries in the region, possibly as retaliation for the U.S.-led Stuxnet campaign.
“Creating a network of seemingly genuine and established LinkedIn personas helps TG-2889 identify and research potential victims. The threat actors can establish a relationship with targets by contacting them directly, or by contacting one of the target’s connections. It may be easier to establish a direct relationship if one of the fake personas is already in the target’s LinkedIn network,” Dell said.
“The level of detail in the profiles suggests that the threat actors invested substantial time and effort into creating and maintaining these personas.”
According to the findings published by Cylance in December, the “Operation Cleaver” hackers used social engineering to trick targets into installing malware that would allow data to then be stolen from infected computers.
Cylance’s report had linked the group to attacks across the world, but Dell’s CTU team said the LinkedIn campaign seems to largely target account holders in the Middle East and northern Africa, a quarter of which work in telecommunications.
“Updates to profile content such as employment history suggest that TG-2889 regularly maintains these fake profiles. The persona changes and job alterations could suggest preparations for a new campaign, and the decision to reference Northrup Grumman and Airbus Group may indicate that the threat actors plan to target the aerospace vertical,” Dell said.
Last month, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told a congressional committee that Iran uses its cyber program to carry out “asymmetric but proportional retaliation against political foes, as well as a sophisticated means of collecting intelligence.” He went on to blame Iranian hackers for cyberattacks against American banks in 2012 and 2013, as well as an assault last year on the Las Vegas Sands casino company.
What does it look like when the president of the United States is a desperate man for a deal? Does he have a platoon of legal eagles searching law and then writing executive orders to finesse the law? The order from the White House is ‘FIND A LOOPHOLE’.
FNC:James Rosen > Some senior U.S. officials involved in the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal have privately concluded that a key sanctions relief provision – a concession to Iran that will open the doors to tens of billions of dollars in U.S.-backed commerce with the Islamic regime – conflicts with existing federal statutes and cannot be implemented without violating those laws, Fox News has learned.
At issue is a passage tucked away in ancillary paperwork attached to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as the Iran nuclear deal is formally known. Specifically, Section 5.1.2 of Annex II provides that in exchange for Iranian compliance with the terms of the deal, the U.S. “shall…license non-U.S. entities that are owned or controlled by a U.S. person to engage in activities with Iran that are consistent with this JCPOA.”
In short, this means that foreign subsidiaries of U.S. parent companies will, under certain conditions, be allowed to do business with Iran. The problem is that the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act (ITRA), signed into law by President Obama in August 2012, was explicit in closing the so-called “foreign sub” loophole.
Indeed, ITRA also stipulated, in Section 218, that when it comes to doing business with Iran, foreign subsidiaries of U.S. parent firms shall in all cases be treated exactly the same as U.S. firms: namely, what is prohibited for U.S. parent firms has to be prohibited for foreign subsidiaries, and what is allowed for foreign subsidiaries has to be allowed for U.S. parent firms.
What’s more, ITRA contains language, in Section 605, requiring that the terms spelled out in Section 218 shall remain in effect until the president of the United States certifies two things to Congress: first, that Iran has been removed from the State Department’s list of nations that sponsor terrorism, and second, that Iran has ceased the pursuit, acquisition, and development of weapons of mass destruction.
Additional executive orders and statutes signed by President Obama, such as the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, have reaffirmed that all prior federal statutes relating to sanctions on Iran shall remain in full effect.
For example, the review act – sponsored by Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) and Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Foreign Relations Committee, and signed into law by President Obama in May – stated that “any measure of statutory sanctions relief” afforded to Iran under the terms of the nuclear deal may only be “taken consistent with existing statutory requirements for such action.” The continued presence of Iran on the State Department’s terror list means that “existing statutory requirements” that were set forth in ITRA, in 2012, have not been met for Iran to receive the sanctions relief spelled out in the JCPOA.
As the Iran deal is an “executive agreement” and not a treaty – and has moreover received no vote of ratification from the Congress, explicit or symbolic – legal analysts inside and outside of the Obama administration have concluded that the JCPOA is vulnerable to challenge in the courts, where federal case law had held that U.S. statutes trump executive agreements in force of law.
Administration sources told Fox News it is the intention of Secretary of State John Kerry, who negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran’s foreign minister and five other world powers, that the re-opening of the “foreign sub” loophole by the JCPOA is to be construed as broadly as possible by lawyers for the State Department, the Treasury Department and other agencies involved in the deal’s implementation.
But the apparent conflict between the re-opening of the loophole and existing U.S. law leaves the Obama administration with only two options going forward. The first option is to violate ITRA, and allow foreign subsidiaries to be treated differently than U.S. parent firms. The second option is to treat both categories the same, as ITRA mandated – but still violate the section of ITRA that required Iran’s removal from the State Department terror list as a pre-condition of any such licensing.
It would also renege on the many promises of senior U.S. officials to keep the broad array of American sanctions on Iran in place. Chris Backemeyer, who served as Iran director for the National Security Council from 2012 to 2014 and is now the State Department’s deputy coordinator for sanctions policy, told POLITICO last month “there will be no real sanctions relief of our primary embargo….We are still going to have sanctions on Iran that prevent most Americans from…engaging in most commercial activities.”
Likewise, in a speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy last month, Adam Szubin, the acting under secretary of Treasury for terrorism and financial crimes, described Iran as “the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism” and said existing U.S. sanctions on the regime “will continue to be enforced….U.S. investment in Iran will be prohibited across the board.”
Nominated to succeed his predecessor at Treasury, Szubin appeared before the Senate Banking Committee for a confirmation hearing the day after his speech to the Washington Institute. At the hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) asked the nominee where the Obama administration finds the “legal underpinnings” for using the JCPOA to re-open the “foreign sub” loophole.
Szubin said the foreign subsidiaries licensed to do business with Iran will have to meet “some very difficult conditions,” and he specifically cited ITRA, saying the 2012 law “contains the licensing authority that Treasury would anticipate using…to allow for certain categories of activity for those foreign subsidiaries.”
Elsewhere, in documents obtained by Fox News, Szubin has maintained that a different passage of ITRA, Section 601, contains explicit reference to an earlier law – the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, on the books since 1977 – and states that the president “may exercise all authorities” embedded in IEEPA, which includes licensing authority for the president.
However, Section 601 is also explicit on the point that the president must use his authorities from IEEPA to “carry out” the terms and provisions of ITRA itself, including Section 218 – which mandated that, before this form of sanctions relief can be granted, Iran must be removed from the State Department’s terror list. Nothing in the Congressional Record indicates that, during debate and passage of ITRA, members of Congress intended for the chief executive to use Section 601 to overturn, rather than “carry out,” the key provisions of his own law.
One administration lawyer contacted by Fox News said the re-opening of the loophole reflects circular logic with no valid legal foundation. “It would be Alice-in-Wonderland bootstrapping to say that [Section] 601 gives the president the authority to restore the foreign subsidiary loophole – the exact opposite of what the statute ordered,” said the attorney, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations over implementation of the Iran deal.
At the State Department on Thursday, spokesman John Kirby told reporters Secretary Kerry is “confident” that the administration “has the authority to follow through on” the commitment to re-open the foreign subsidiary loophole.
“Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the president has broad authorities, which have been delegated to the secretary of the Treasury, to license activities under our various sanctions regimes, and the Iran sanctions program is no different,” Kirby said.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the G.O.P. presidential candidate who is a Harvard-trained lawyer and ardent critic of the Iran deal, said the re-opening of the loophole fits a pattern of the Obama administration enforcing federal laws selectively.
“It’s a problem that the president doesn’t have the ability wave a magic wand and make go away,” Cruz told Fox News in an interview. “Any U.S. company that follows through on this, that allows their foreign-owned subsidiaries to do business with Iran, will very likely face substantial civil liability, litigation and potentially even criminal prosecution. The obligation to follow federal law doesn’t go away simply because we have a lawless president who refuses to acknowledge or follow federal law.”
A spokesman for the Senate Banking Committee could not offer any time frame as to when the committee will vote on Szubin’s nomination.
In the months since the signing of the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act (which we will stubbornly continue to refer to here as “ITRA”), the Obama administration has worked to implement tougher sanctions against Iran. Although many of the ITRA regulations are not expected until early November, an Executive Order issued last week marked the beginning of a much stricter era of sanctions pursuant to ITRA, the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 (ISA), and the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA).
On October 9, 2012, sixty days after President Obama signed ITRA into law, he issued Executive Order No. 13,628, extending U.S. Iran sanctions to cover foreign subsidiaries of U.S. parent companies, a prohibition that did not exist until promulgated in ITRA.[1] The Executive Order implements ITRA Section 218,[2] which we highlighted in our August 17, 2012 post, by providing that:
No entity owned or controlled by a United States person and established or maintained outside the United States may knowingly engage in any transaction, directly or indirectly, with the Government of Iran or any person subject to the jurisdiction of the Government of Iran, if that transaction would be prohibited by [the pre-existing Iran sanctions].
The Executive Order defines the term “entity” to mean “a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization.” This is a slight expansion of the definition provided by Congress in Section 218, which does not include the words “group” or “subgroup.” The resulting definition appears to authorize sanctions where any group “controlled by” a U.S. person, regardless of whether the group is formally incorporated, conducts prohibited Iran-related business.
The Executive Order gives no quarter for existing contracts, and authorizes standard Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) penalties against the U.S. person controlling the foreign entity. However, Subsection 4(c) of the Order provides that civil penalties shall not apply if the U.S. person divests or terminates its business with the foreign subsidiary not later than February 6, 2013.
The Order also directs that Secretaries of Treasury and State to issue regulations to implement several other provisions of ITRA (though the ITRA itself also directed the issuance of such regulations within 90 days of the effective date of the statute). Thus, Treasury regulations may be expected by around November 8, 2012 regarding several ITRA provisions, including the following:
Section 202, which requires the imposition of at least five ISA sanctions on any person who, on or after November 8, 2012, beneficially owns, operates, or controls a vessel that is used to transport crude oil from Iran to another country. This provision applies, however, only if the President determines under the National Defense Authorization Act that there is a sufficient supply of petroleum from countries other than Iran to permit petroleum purchasers to significantly reduce purchases from Iran;
Section 214, which increases the availability of sanctions on subsidiaries and agents of UN-sanctioned persons;
Section 215, which extends the availability of sanctions against persons connected to Iran’s weapons of mass destruction to any foreign financial institution who aids that person; and
Section 216 adds a new section to CISADA, expanding sanctions to apply to financial institutions connected to certain proliferation or terrorism activities of Iran or its National Guard.
In addition to the forthcoming regulations, the President is required to provide a great deal of information to Congress on and after November 8. Under section 211, the President must report to Congress on the identity of operators of vessels and persons that conduct or facilitate significant financial transactions that manage Iranian ports designated for sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Furthermore, the President must provide the identity of and the restrictions on individuals, including senior Iranian officials, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Officials, foreign persons supporting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and foreign government agencies carrying out transactions with certain Iran-affiliated persons.[3]
The Secretaries of Treasury and State also are required to report to the relevant Congressional committees on certain aspects of the implementation of ITRA. Under Section 206, the Secretary of State must brief Congress on the implementation of the ISA by November 8, 2012, and every 120 days thereafter. The Secretary of Treasury, pursuant to sections 216 and 220, must report to Congress on the implementation of sanctions on persons and entities who provide financial assistance to proliferation and terrorism activities.
The pace of Iran sanctions has accelerated rapidly in recent months and should be expected to continue to increase over the near and medium term. We will continue to provide our analysis of new developments here.
[1] On the same day the Executive Order was issued, OFAC issued a “Frequently Asked Questions” document providing guidance with regard to the Order.
[2] Sec. 218 – Liability of Parent Companies for Violations of Sanctions by Foreign Subsidiaries (requiring the President and the Secretary of Treasury to promulgate regulations within 60 days of enactment).
