The world's second-largest tobacco company has agreed to cough up $635 million plus interest to American authorities to settle a North Korea sanctions-busting case. British American Tobacco admitted that a subsidiary conspired to violate US sanctions by selling tobacco products to North Korea between 2007 and 2017, the BBC reports. The company said it had entered a deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice and a civil settlement with the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. The subsidiary, BAT Marketing Singapore, pleaded guilty to the sanctions violation charge.
The Justice Department also announced criminal charges against a North Korean banker and two Chinese facilitators involved in buying leaf tobacco for North Korean cigarette companies and forging documents to fool banks into processing transactions on behalf of the North Korean firms. The North Korean companies, including one owned by the country's military, made an estimated $700 million from the shady deals, reports the BBC. "This case and others like it do serve as a warning shot to companies," said Matthew Olsen at the Justice Department's National Security Division, per Reuters.
Olsen called the settlement the "single largest North Korea sanctions penalty" on record. "We deeply regret the misconduct arising from historical business activities that led to these settlements, and acknowledge that we fell short of the highest standards rightly expected of us," Jack Bowles, BAT's chief executive, said in a statement, per Sky News. "In recent years we have transformed our compliance and ethics programme, which encompasses sanctions, anti-bribery, anti-corruption and anti-money laundering," Bowles said. (More North Korea stories.)
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