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Published: Wednesday, 02 October 2019 15:26

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Photo: RHCWashington, Oct. 2 - The US Department of the Treasury reported that the General Electric (GE) company will pay a fine of two million 718 thousand 581 dollars for alleged violations related to Washington's blockade against Cuba.

Through a statement, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of that federal entity informed that the American firm based in Boston, Massachusetts, agreed to pay such penalty on behalf of three subsidiaries (Getsco Technical Services Inc., Bentley Nevada and GE Betz).

According to the text, these GE companies incurred 289 alleged violations of the Cuban Asset Control Regulation from December 2010 to February 2014.

During that stage, the statement added, the aforementioned entities accepted payments made by The Cobalt Refinery Company (Cobalt) for goods and services provided to a GE customer in Canada “with strong historical and current economic ties with the Cuban mining industry”.

The statement indicated that since 1995 Cobalt was identified as a “specially designated national” of Cuba and was included in the List of Specially Designated Nationals and People Blocked by that Treasury Department office.

"The publicly available information also showed that GE's former Canadian client is a corporation with strong historical and current economic ties with the Cuban mining industry through its commercial associations and joint ventures with the Cuban government," said OFAC.

According to the office, GE companies approved Cobalt as the third payer and, over a period of four years, did not adequately recognize the significant and widely published relationship between Cobalt and his Canadian client, and neglected their customers´ activities.

The OFAC determined that GE voluntarily disclosed the alleged violations and considered that they constituted a “non-serious” case, elements that attenuated the amount of the fine, but noted that the maximum civil monetary penalty applicable in this type of matters is 18 million 785 thousand dollars.

News about the imposition of fines or punishments for violations of the US blockade against Cuba almost 60 years ago are frequent under any US administration and, in many cases, show the extraterritorial nature of that policy.

This new penalty in particular is announced when the Republican executive Donald Trump takes various measures to intensify that economic, commercial and financial fence, condemned by the overwhelming majority of the international community.

Other fines applied this year due to the blockade hit the companies Expedia Group, Hotelbeds USA and Cubasphere, and the Italian banking firm Grupo UniCredit. (RHC)