On February 24, 2022, Covington & Burling LLP and AmCham Germany hosted an Expert Webinar on "EU and UK Export Controls and Economic Sanctions Impacting U.S. and German Companies."
Emanuel Ghebregergis, Associate in Covington's Frankfurt office and part of Covington’s trade controls practice group, started with a brief overview of the European Dual Use Regulation Recast that came into force in September 2021. The general principle of the Dual Use Regulation basically remains the same. The regulation is directly applicable to all 27 EU member states. The EU members states authorities are responsible for enforcing the provisions of the Dual Use Regulation which often leads to a divergence of interpretations of the controls and the regulation with some member states.
The new regulation does however some new controls in some very specific areas, e.g. the new controls for cyber-surveillance items.
David Lorello, of counsel in Covington’s London office, explained that upon Brexit the UK basically transposed the EU sanctions and export controls into UK law. For the most part the transposition was faithful, the same standards that had applied before Brexit continued to apply after Brexit. However there were a couple of new restrictions that were put in place particularly with regard to sanctions. Over time, changes are likely to increase as each regime evolves.
We are already seeing differences between the UK approach and the EU approach regarding sanctions. We note a continued appetite in EU and UK to turn to unilateral sanctions measures when warranted.
There is some coordination between the EU/UK and the U.S. (e.g. Russia), but there are many areas where EU/UK will not go as far as the U.S. and some areas where the EU/UK sanctions extend beyond the U.S.
The Dual Use Regulation is very similar to the U.S. Standard’s Control List. From the sanction’s standpoint there has been increased coordination in various respects between the U.S. and Europe, the Russia Sanctions are probably the most significant example. But there continue to be also very significant differences as well.
Dr. Michael Landwehr, responsible for the strategic customs and foreign trade at GEA Group AG, offered some perspectives from the in-house compliance standpoint. He explained how GEA has implemented an ICP compliance management system.
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