International tobacco company agrees to pay $508 million to settle violations of sanctions
Statutory maximum civil monetary penalty
Statutory maximum civil monetary penalty
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) today announced that a tobacco and cigarette manufacturer headquartered in London, England has agreed to pay over $508 million to settle its potential civil liability for apparent violations of OFAC’s sanctions against North Korea and weapons of mass destruction proliferators.
As explained in the OFAC release [PDF 163 KB] (April 25, 2023), the apparent violations arose from the formation of a conspiracy to export tobacco and related products to North Korea and receive payment for those exports through the U.S. financial system and from a subsidiary’s use of U.S. financial institutions to receive or otherwise process U.S. dollar-denominated (USD) payments for the sale of cigarettes to the North Korean embassy in Singapore. In doing so, the British company caused U.S. financial institutions to process wire transfers that contained the blocked property interests of sanctioned North Korean banks and to export financial services and facilitate the exportation of tobacco to North Korea.
The settlement amount—OFAC’s largest ever with a non-financial institution—is equal to the statutory maximum civil monetary penalty and reflects OFAC’s determination that the apparent violations were egregious and not voluntarily self-disclosed.
Read a related Treasury release (April 25, 2023)
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