BAE Systems set to pay $36 million over military-technology export violations
The Justice Department’s newly created National Fraud Enforcement Division listed trade and customs violations among its enforcement priorities in a memo issued Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday in its Morning Risk Report newsletter. The memo, from Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald, also identifies forced labor in supply chains, healthcare marketing fraud, public trust cases and corporate misconduct as focus areas.
The healthcare focus includes investigations into marketing for unsafe products and services that deceive consumers, according to the memo. The memo also said the Fraud and Enforcement Division will lead the Justice Department’s criminal enforcement strategy, targeting trade and customs violations as well as forced labor in supply chains.
“We are organizing the Division to be lean, flat and agile, reducing excessive bureaucratic oversight so that the Fraud Division’s career prosecutors…can focus on following the facts and charging violations of the law,” McDonald said in the memo.
Separately, the same newsletter reported that BAE Systems is set to pay $36 million for violating U.S. export restrictions on military technology. The newsletter did not specify which export restrictions were involved, identify the underlying transactions, or name the federal agency involved.
The same Morning Risk Report newsletter covered several other items in its Friday roundup. A Polestar dealer in New Jersey filed suit alleging the Chinese-owned automaker “orchestrated” its recent U.S. ban as “cover” for its desire to leave the American market. Prestige Imports of East Hanover, N.J., doing business as Prestige Polestar and owned by dealer Matthew Haiken, alleges the automaker’s decision wrongfully terminates its state dealer franchise agreement and is owed at least $25 million in damages, according to the lawsuit filed in New Jersey state court.
Separately, the U.S. military is preparing to send the USS George Washington to the Middle East to relieve the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which has gone more than 250 days without a port call during its deployment, a record. Several lawmakers cited by the Journal expressed concern about reports of food and personal-supply shortages aboard the carrier as well as plumbing backups. A U.S. official confirmed a person went overboard from the Lincoln in early August but was quickly rescued.
In Taiwan, the coast guard took on an expanded national-security role in a drill held at the southern port of Kaohsiung. A coast guard cutter led four missile boats out of the port, followed about 30 minutes later by a naval deployment of mobile radars, missile launchers, assault boats and drones — a sequence the newsletter said illustrated how Taiwan would respond to a Chinese amphibious invasion.