Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2662 actions· ✨ 89 recent

The Income Tax (Amendment) Act, 2021 (Act No. 43 of 2021), assented 30 December 2021 and in force from 1 January 2022, re-introduces the deductibility of Mineral Royalty Tax (MRT) paid under the Mines and Minerals Development Act, 2015 when computing a mining company's taxable income for corporate income tax purposes. The Act removes mineral royalty from the list of non-deductible expenditures in section 44 of the Income Tax Act, reversing a non-deductibility rule that had applied since a 2015-era amendment and that mining companies and industry stakeholders had argued produced double taxation of the same revenue stream. Deductibility is conditional on the royalty having actually been paid for the charge year.

OFAC amended 31 CFR Part 539 (Weapons of Mass Destruction Trade Control Regulations) to add Executive Order 13382 (28 June 2005, blocking property of WMD proliferators and their supporters) as an explicit statutory authority for the programme. The rule simultaneously removed Appendix I to Part 539, which had listed foreign persons subject to import measures; all persons previously enumerated in the appendix had already been determined no longer subject to those measures via prior Federal Register publications. Three definitions in Sections 539.301, 539.302, and 539.304 were updated to remove cross-references to the now-deleted appendix. The amendment is purely administrative with no change to the substantive scope of WMD trade-control prohibitions.

FinCEN amended 31 CFR Part 1010 to remove civil penalty language that had become obsolete following the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 (AJCA). The AJCA restructured FBAR (Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts) penalties, raising the maximum for willful violations beyond what the pre-existing regulation text authorised, creating an inconsistency between statute and regulation. The final rule is administrative in nature: it deletes superseded penalty provisions and aligns regulatory text with the statutory penalty structure already in force since 2004, imposing no new obligations on FBAR filers.

FinCEN issued a final rule (86 FR 62914, effective 15 November 2021) amending 31 CFR 1010.370 to align its Geographic Targeting Order (GTO) regulations with statutory amendments to 31 U.S.C. 5326 (Bank Secrecy Act). The principal change extends GTO authority to cover nonfinancial trades or businesses in addition to domestic financial institutions — broadening the pool of entities that FinCEN can subject to heightened transaction-reporting and recordkeeping requirements in a designated geographic area. The rule also updates the notification procedure (directing GTOs to chief executive officers) to conform to the amended statute. No new GTO was issued by this rule; it is a framework update enabling future GTO issuance to a wider class of obligees.

Effective 5 October 2021, BIS published a final rule (86 FR 55268, FR Doc 2021-20649) making targeted editorial corrections and clarifications across eleven parts of the Export Administration Regulations (15 CFR Parts 732, 734, 736, 738, 740, 744, 748, 750, 770, 772, and 774). The errors corrected were inadvertent inconsistencies between different EAR parts where outdated or slightly divergent language had accumulated; the rule aligns those sections with the most-current language used elsewhere in the regulations. No substantive changes to licensing requirements, control lists, or end-use restrictions were made — this is a regulatory maintenance action.

Final rule amending 15 CFR §§ 705.5 and 705.6 to require that any interested-party application for a Section 232 national-security import investigation include a public version of the application with business-confidential information redacted. Prior to this rule, many petitioners voluntarily submitted public versions; the rule codifies the practice as mandatory. The change applies to all future Section 232 petitions regardless of sector, effective on the date of publication in the Federal Register (24 September 2021).

The Personal Information Protection Law of the People's Republic of China (中华人民共和国个人信息保护法 — PIPL) was adopted at the 30th meeting of the 13th NPC Standing Committee on 20 August 2021 and entered into force on 1 November 2021, constituting the third and final pillar of China's cybersecurity and data-governance regulatory trinity alongside the Cybersecurity Law (2016) and the Data Security Law (2021). The PIPL is China's comprehensive personal-information statute establishing consent-based and necessity-based legal bases for PI processing, a tiered cross-border personal-data transfer regime (CAC security assessment / PI protection certification / Standard Contractual Clauses), extraterritorial application (Art. 3) to non-Chinese controllers offering services to or analysing the behaviour of PRC residents, and a heightened protection regime for sensitive personal information and data of minors under 14. It mandates data-protection impact assessments, personal-information-protection-officer obligations at designated handlers, breach notification, and a full suite of data-subject rights including access, rectification, deletion, portability, objection, and automated- decision-making opt-out. Article 53 requires overseas controllers to establish a domestic representative or designated entity in China, providing a domestic enforcement counterparty.

The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) published a final rule on August 19, 2021 (FR Doc 2021-17647, RIN 0694-AF47) making technical corrections and clarifications to the January 23, 2020 rule that transferred firearms, guns, and ammunition from USML Categories I, II, and III under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) to the Commerce Control List (CCL). Corrections address cross-reference errors, clarify Firearms Convention Import Certificate validity periods relative to BIS license periods, simplify commodity description requirements in electronic export filings, and add technical notes on controlled items (e.g. BMG cartridges, barrel blanks). ECCN 0A018 is removed as unused; ECCN 0A501.y.2–.y.5 entries are reserved. The rule is effective September 20, 2021.

Germany's Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz (LkSG), promulgated 16 July 2021 (BGBl. I 2021 S. 2959), requires German-headquartered companies to conduct mandatory human-rights and environmental due diligence across their own operations and direct suppliers (with cause-based obligations extending to indirect suppliers). Enforced by BAFA with administrative fines up to EUR 8 million or 2% of global annual turnover for firms with revenue ≥ EUR 400 million. The act applies to ~3,000 German corporates from 1 January 2023 (≥3,000 employees) and was extended to ~5,000 firms from 1 January 2024 (≥1,000 employees). A September 2025 cabinet amendment removed the annual-reporting obligation and narrowed sanctionable omissions to serious violations.

The Law of the People's Republic of China on Countering Foreign Sanctions was adopted at the 29th meeting of the Standing Committee of the 13th NPC on 10 June 2021 (Presidential Order No. 90, President Xi Jinping) and entered into force on the same day. Comprising 16 articles, it establishes the unified statutory framework for China's countermeasure regime against foreign states or organisations that "violate international law and basic norms of international relations" by imposing discriminatory restrictive measures against Chinese citizens and organisations — the parent authority under which every China countermeasure-list, Unreliable Entity List, blocking-statute, and supply-chain-security instrument in the IPTM register operates. Article 6 enumerates the countermeasure toolbox (visa denial, asset freezes, transaction prohibitions, and "other necessary measures"); Article 12 is the blocking-statute provision that prohibits PRC persons from implementing foreign discriminatory measures — first operationalised in May 2026 against five US-sanctions-compliant refineries.

The Data Security Law of the People's Republic of China (中华人民共和国数据安全法) was adopted at the 29th meeting of the 13th NPC Standing Committee on 10 June 2021 and entered into force on 1 September 2021, constituting the second pillar of China's cybersecurity and data-governance regulatory trinity alongside the Cybersecurity Law (2016) and the Personal Information Protection Law (2021). The DSL establishes a tiered data-classification regime — "important data" and "national core data" — with escalating security obligations including risk assessment, risk monitoring, breach reporting, and classified-protection requirements for data handlers. It introduces a data-export security review for "important data" generated or collected within China, the statutory parent authority operationalised by the 2024 CAC Cross-Border Data Flow Provisions, and enacts a §36 blocking statute prohibiting Chinese organisations and individuals from transferring data stored in China to foreign judicial or law-enforcement authorities without prior PRC government approval.

The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) amended the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) to formally recognise the United Arab Emirates' termination of participation in the Arab League Boycott of Israel, effective retroactively to 16 August 2020 — the date of UAE Federal Decree-Law No. 4 of 2020. The rule removes UAE from the EAR's list of countries requiring cooperation with an international boycott (Supplement No. 1 to Part 760), meaning requests from UAE entities will no longer be presumed boycott-related under Part 760 antiboycott provisions. The BIS action follows parallel de-listing by the Department of the Treasury (April 2021) and the Department of State's certification to Congress (April 2021), completing the US regulatory alignment with the Abraham Accords normalisation of UAE-Israel relations.

On June 1, 2021, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) published FR Doc 2021-11585 (86 FR 29189) notifying the public that, effective May 26, 2021, BIS had assumed jurisdiction over certain firearms-related "technology" and "software" — specifically digital files (CAD/AMF/G-code) for 3D-printed firearms and CNC milling instruction files — under ECCNs 0D501 and 0E501 of the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). The transfer was triggered by the Ninth Circuit's April 27, 2021 vacatur of a March 6, 2020 district-court preliminary injunction that had blocked the technology/software prong of the broader January 23, 2020 USML-to-CCL transfer rule. Internet posting of such files now requires a BIS license (review policy: denial), completing the full implementation of the January 2020 rule transferring USML Categories I–III (firearms, guns, and ammunition) from ITAR/State Department to EAR/Commerce jurisdiction.

Sri Lanka's Imports and Exports (Control) Regulations No. 07 of 2021, published as Gazette Extraordinary No. 2226/48 on 6 May 2021, banned the import of mineral and chemical fertilisers and placed agrochemicals (pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides and plant-growth regulators) under a Special Import Licence requirement, applying to shipments with bills of lading issued on or after 6 May 2021. The measure operationalised the government's declared policy of converting Sri Lanka to fully organic agriculture. Facing a sharp drop in crop yields and food insecurity, the government repealed the restrictions from 30 November 2021.

OFAC published a final rule on March 17, 2021 (86 FR 14534) adjusting the maximum civil monetary penalty (CMP) ceiling amounts across multiple statutory sanctions authorities as mandated by the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act of 1990 (as amended by the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015). The 2021 adjustment reflects the October 2019 to October 2020 CPI-U change (approximately 1.2%, reflecting COVID-suppressed inflation), raising the IEEPA ceiling from $307,922 to $311,562, the TWEA ceiling from $90,743 to $91,816, and the FNKDA maximum from $1,529,991 to $1,548,075. The rule is issued as a final rule effective on publication without prior notice and comment under the non-discretionary "good cause" exemption.

The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) amended the Chemical Weapons Convention Regulations (CWCR, 15 CFR Part 710) and Export Administration Regulations (EAR, 15 CFR Parts 712 and 745) to implement two OPCW Conference of States Parties decisions (C-24/DEC.4 and C-24/DEC.5) from November 2019. The rule adds four chemical families — two families of alkyl phosphonamidic fluorides, O-alkyl phosphoramidofluoridates, and quaternary/bisquaternary carbamates — to CWC Schedule 1(A), effective immediately upon publication. The rule also clarifies the definition of "production" in 15 CFR § 710.1 to include intermediates, by-products, and waste products generated within a defined manufacturing sequence.