US Treasury Fines German Chemical Company for Violating Cuba Embargo

The US government has fined a German chemical firm for selling reagents to Cuba in violation of sanctions, the Treasury Department said in a press release.

"The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) today announced a $5,512,564 penalty against AppliChem GmbH ("AppliChem") of Darmstadt, Germany", the release said on Thursday. "AppliChem violated… Cuban Assets Control Regulations when it fulfilled Cuba orders of chemical reagents on 304 invoices".

AppliChem’s US parent corporation voluntarily self-disclosed the violations, the release said. OFAC ruled that the infractions constituted "an egregious case", according to the Treasury Department.

The Cuban Assets Control Regulations, passed in 1963, is the primary mechanism for the United States to enforce its trade embargo against Cuba.

Following the victory of the Cuban revolutionaries over the US-backed regime in 1959, Washington severed diplomatic ties with Cuba and imposed a trade embargo on the country. In 2014, Washington and Havana expressed their intention to start working on normalizing bilateral relations. As a result, many restrictions on exchanges between the United States and Cuba were eased under then President Barack Obama.

In June 2017, US President Donald Trump reversed the policy of his predecessor and abandoned attempts to normalize relations with Havana. Since then, Trump has set new limits for US citizens traveling to Cuba, and banned payments to a military-linked organization that controls the island's tourist industry.