CTP Mid-Year Report

As we pass the halfway mark of our year, it’s time to take stock, acknowledge new and old colleagues, and look ahead to a productive Q3. All the CTP teams have been busy in recent months, as detailed below. We’ve added several new employees and, tragically, lost an old friend when Kevin Cummings suffered a fatal fall recently in Europe. Coming fast is the annual BIS conference Update, where we meet many of our government and private clients, and beyond that we have several new partnerships for exciting government projects this fall.

In just the past three months, Anneli Barnes and our Commercial Law Development Program (CLDP) team have organized events in/with Afghanistan, Hungary, Austria, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Iraq, Armenia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Mali, Nigeria, and Croatia. The Commercial Law topics vary widely, including Copyright Management, Government Procurement, Adjudication of Bankruptcy, Arbitration, and Dispute Resolution.

Over in Ghana, Bill Kuhn and his INL team have been hosting a steady stream of multilateral activities at the new Regional Training Facility (RTF) in Accra that we are managing for the International Narcotics & Law Enforcement (INL) bureau of the Department of State. We blogged recently about the hugely successful Judiciary course and it was preceded in close order by events focusing on Public Corruption, Seaport Enforcement Issues, Cybercrime, Border Interdiction, Financial Investigations, and Intellectual Property Rights. All these courses are part of the WACSI initiative, striving to reduce transnational crime and strengthen civil society in the West African region.

Carolyn Burke and her staff are similarly busy supporting the Export Control Cooperation (ECC) office over at the Export Control & Border Security (EXBS) bureau of the Department of State. Their events in recent weeks have been in/with Cambodia, Mexico, Indonesia, Croatia, Oman, Macedonia, Albania and Moldova, conducting technical exchanges on a wide variety of trade and border security objectives, all devoted to nonproliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

The Private Sector team is having their busiest year ever, helping U.S. exporters cope with export control reforms. The engineering team, led by Bruce Webb, welcomes the addition of two new experts, Joe Young and Rob Lerner, both ex-licensing officers, and we will be joined next month by another engineer, John Sturtevant. Our Senior Legal Specialist, Robin Schwartzman, recently opened the East Coast Regional Compliance and Ethics Conference of the Society for Corporate Compliance and Ethics with an address on Opportunities and Compliance Risk in Export Control Reform.

None of this would be possible without CFO, Carol Leonard, and her Finance team or without the leadership of the Executive Team, consisting of Tom Fergus, Dale Barone, and Dave Claybaugh. We look forward to the coming months.