Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2665 actions· ✨ 90 recent

Ethiopia's Banking Business Proclamation No. 1360/2025, ratified by the House of Peoples' Representatives on 17 December 2024 and gazetted in March 2025, repeals Proclamation 592/2008 and opens Ethiopia's banking sector to foreign participation for the first time since the 1974 Derg-era nationalisations. Foreign banks may enter via subsidiary establishment, branch licensing, representative offices, or equity acquisition in existing domestic banks. A single strategic foreign investor is capped at 40% ownership per domestic bank, with aggregate foreign ownership across all investors capped at 49%. The reform positions Ethiopia — Africa's second-most-populous country — as a competitor to Nairobi, Lagos, and Johannesburg as an African banking centre, unlocking entry plans by Standard Bank, KCB Group, Equity Bank, ABSA, and GCC-based institutions.

The Ethiopian Capital Market Authority (ECMA) issued Directive No. 1009/2024 on 16 July 2024, establishing the comprehensive licensing, operational, and supervisory framework for securities exchanges, derivatives exchanges, and the over-the-counter (OTC) market under the authority of Article 108 of the Capital Market Proclamation No. 1248/2021. The directive consolidates Ethiopia's previously fragmented securities-trading architecture into a single, licensed, and regulated market structure and provided the statutory pathway for the Ethiopian Securities Exchange (ESX) to receive the country's first securities-exchange licence. This is the first capital-markets architecture filing for Ethiopia on the IPTM register, forming the operating- licence layer alongside the banking-sector liberalisation enacted under Proclamation 1360/2025.

FinCEN issued a final rule under Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act (31 U.S.C. § 5318A) prohibiting US covered financial institutions from opening or maintaining a correspondent account for, or on behalf of, Iraq-based Al-Huda Bank, a foreign financial institution found to be of primary money-laundering concern. Treasury determined that Al-Huda Bank exploited its access to US dollars to support designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations including Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and IRGC-Quds Force, as well as Iran-aligned Iraqi militias Kata'ib Hizballah and Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq. The rule also imposes a special-due-diligence requirement on US covered institutions to guard against indirect access via foreign correspondent accounts. Published in the Federal Register on July 3, 2024; effective August 2, 2024.

OFAC final rule (FR Doc 2024-11618, 89 FR 46518) amending the Cuban Assets Control Regulations at 31 CFR Part 515 to further implement the May 2022 Biden administration policy of expanded support for the Cuban people. The rule reinstates the "U-turn" general license (authorizing US banks to process funds transfers that originate and terminate outside the US, neither originator nor beneficiary a US person); replaces "self-employed individual" with the broader "independent private sector entrepreneur" (covering Cuban private businesses up to 100 employees, including private cooperatives); authorizes Cuban nationals in the private sector and located in Cuba to open and operate accounts at US financial institutions (including via online/mobile banking); and expands authorizations for internet-based services to support Cuban civil society and private-sector entrepreneurs. Effective 29 May 2024.

Presidential Decree No. 442 of 23 May 2024 establishes a special judicial-administrative procedure by which the Russian Federation or the Central Bank of the Russian Federation can claim, before a Russian court, that an "unjustified deprivation" of Russian sovereign property has been effected by a state body or judicial authority of the United States — and, on a court finding to that effect, receive equivalent-value US-affiliated property located in Russia (real assets, securities issued by Russian companies, cash held in Russian bank accounts, and other property rights) by way of compensation. The mechanism is an explicit reciprocal counter-instrument to the US REPO for Ukrainians Act (Title II of H.R.815, signed 24 April 2024) authorising US executive confiscation of immobilised Russian sovereign assets in US jurisdiction. The decree is structurally extensible: by separate presidential decision, the same procedure may be applied to any other state Russia designates as "unfriendly". Implementing procedural acts and amendments to Russian legislation were required to be adopted by 23 September 2024.

Three Commission Delegated Regulations (CDR 2024/1772, 1773, 1774) adopted 13 March 2024 and published in the EU Official Journal on 25 June 2024 constitute the first batch of binding Level 2 implementing rules under DORA (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554). CDR 2024/1772 sets ICT incident classification criteria and materiality thresholds for mandatory reporting; CDR 2024/1773 specifies the required content of contractual policies for ICT third-party services supporting critical or important functions; CDR 2024/1774 defines the ICT risk management tools, methods, processes, and policies — including a simplified framework for smaller in-scope entities. All three apply from 17 January 2025 alongside the parent DORA regulation, covering approximately 22,000 EU regulated financial entities.

On 21 February 2024, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev signed Presidential Decree DP-37 approving the 2024 State Program for the Implementation of the "Uzbekistan-2030" Strategy under the slogan "Year of Support for Youth and Business". The decree converts the parent Uzbekistan-2030 doctrine (DP-158 of 11 September 2023) into binding annual execution targets covering SOE privatisation and IPO programmes (Navoi MMC, Almalyk MMC, Uzbekistan National Investment Fund), industrial localisation, sectoral investment lines, "green economy" and water-management benchmarks, and youth-business support measures. DP-37 functions as the master annual operationalisation instrument for Uzbekistan's 2024 industrial and investment policy stack, anchoring the downstream subsoil recodification (LRU-987, Oct 2024) and critical-minerals national programme (March 2025).