OFAC settles with General Electric

On 1 October 2019 the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced a $2,718,581 settlement with Boston’s The General Electric Company (“GE”). GE agreed to this settlement on behalf of its current and former subsidiaries Getsco Technical Services Inc., Bentley Nevada, and GE Betz (collectively, the “GE Companies”) for 289 alleged violations of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations, 31 C.F.R. part 515 (CACR). Apparently, between December 2010 and February 2014, the GE companies accepted payment from The Cobalt Refinery Company (“Cobalt”), an entity on OFAC’s List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (the “SDN List”) since June 1995. Although payment checks contained Cobalt’s full legal name as it appears on the SDN List, as well as Cobalt’s acronym (“Corefco”), “the GE Companies’ sanctions screening software, which screened only the abbreviation of the SDN’s name, never alerted on Cobalt’s name.” OFAC has determined that due to the voluntarily disclosure of the apparent violations, this is a non-egregious case.

For more information on this case please read the web notice.