The International Enforcement Law Reporter is a monthly print and online journal covering news and trends in international enforcement law.
Since September 1985, the International Enforcement Law Reporter has analyzed the premier developments in both the substantive and procedural aspects of international enforcement law. Read by practitioners, academics, and politicians, the IELR is a valuable guide to the difficult and dynamic field of international law.
On August 20, 2024, George Semere Quintero (Semerene), 60, of Venezuela, pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of his role in a scheme to evade U.S. sanctions imposed on Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), a Venezuelan state-owned oil company.
On August 12, 2024, the United States Department of Justice announced that Bulgarian national Milan Dimitrov, 50, made his initial appearance in a federal court in San Antonio after Greece extradited him. The indictment charges Milan Dimitrov with conspiring with Ilias Sabirov, 52, of Russia, and Dimitar Dimitrov, 74, of Bulgaria to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Export Control Reform Act (ECRA) in an arrangement to obtain sensitive radiation-hardened integrated circuits from the United States and illegally export the components to Russia through Bulgaria without the required licenses from the U.S. government.
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) charged a Pakistani man, Asif Raza Merchant, 46, with conspiracy to assassinate US officials in retaliation for the 2020 assassination of Qassam Soleimani. No names of the intended targets have been released, but the FBI speculates that former US President Donald Trump (the author of Soleimani’s assassination) was among them.
On August 1, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice unveiled a new initiative directed at corporate crime: the Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program.[1] The Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program is a three-year initiative managed by the Criminal Division’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section.
On August 15, 2024, New Zealand’s Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith signed the extradition order of Kim Dotcom to the United States. Born in Germany, Dotcom moved to New Zealand in 2010 and has fought extradition to the U.S. since 2012. In 2012, the U.S. government closed his file-sharing site Megaupload and indicted him and three other persons.
On August 8, 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the indictments of two Iranian nationals and one Pakistani national. Iranian brothers Shahab Mir’kazei and Yunus Mir’kazei, and Pakistani citizen Muhammad Pahlawan were charged with “conspiring to provide and providing material support to Iran’s weapons of mass destruction program resulting in death and conspiring to commit violence against maritime navigation and maritime transport involving weapons of mass destruction resulting in death.”
Equatorial Guinea has rebuffed South African government requests to release from prison two oil engineers: Frik Potgieter, a South African, and Peter Huxham, a dual South African-British national. The men are being held on charges of trafficking cocaine.
On Monday, July 29, Israeli military police detained nine military reservists at a military base currently holding thousands of Palestinian prisoners from Gaza. Although officials have not released details about the alleged crimes, the military reservists are undergoing a formal investigation for the suspected abuse of a Palestinian detainee. More specifically, they are being questioned for performing acts of sodomy on the detainee who was hospitalized due to the severity of his physical injuries.
