26 March 1992
Ms H Taylor NPDD
FCO
MAB 087/1
M.Jen
Yes
Ра
How progress but
Dear Helen.
the end
нежно
Seight.
ilh
now
British Embassy Washington
Commercial Department
3100 Massachusetts Ave N.W.
Washington D.C. 20008-3600
Telephone: (202)
898 4265
Telex; RCA 211427 or 216760-WUT 64224
Menem 1/4
HONG KONG EXPORT CONTROLS: EXCHANGE OF LETTERS
Facsimile: (202) 898-4224
1. My letter to you of 24 January recorded that Pennington (Office of COCOM Affairs, State Department) told me that the Commerce Department would publish a rule change in the Federal Register before the end of February, which would extend to Hong Kong the licensing benefits agreed in the recent Exchange of Letters between the UK, the US and Hong Kong.
2.
The end of February came and went, and I rang Pennington in early March to find out what was happening. He said that a draft of the Federal Register entry had been circulating and had been cleared by almost all interested agencies: it should be published within a week or so. Last week, I rang Pennington again, who promised to check the position and get back to me, and then promptly departed on holiday for three weeks without doing so.
3. I then spoke to Hurley (his boss at the Office of COCOM Affairs), who told me today that a Federal Register entry had been cleared by all interested agencies, but was currently stuck at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), whose staff scrutinised all proposed new regulations. The process of scrutiny was complicated by the fact that the President had announced (in his January State of the Union address) a ninety-day moratorium on new regulations. OMB exempted from this new regulations which decreased rather than increased red tape, and he was confident that the Hong Kong rule change would fall into this category. But it was proving somewhat difficult to hurry OMB along. I asked him to prod OMB again, and he agreed to do so, but without much enthusiasm.
B