June 20-2014
The Fokker Services company of the Netherlands was fined $21 million last week for an astounding 1,112 violations of the US sanctions against Iran over five years.
The US Treasury Department said Fokker sold Iran American-made spare parts for its aircraft or arranged to have parts repaired in the United States on 1,112 occasions. It didn’t say many spare parts were involved altogether in those 1,112 sales from November 2005 to September 2010
The Treasury Department said the fine could have been more than $145 million, but it agreed to the much lower number, as it usually does in such cases.
In addition to the illegal sales to Iran, there were a handful of illegal sales to Sudan and Myanmar as well.
The Fokker aircraft company that made planes from before World War I went bankrupting 1996. Fokker Services is the successor firm that provides parts and services for firms that still operate Fokkers.
The Treasury Department said Fokker’s violations of the sanctions were “flagrant” and clearly intentional, not just a mistake. In some cases, Treasury said, Fokker cited false tail numbers to obscure the fact that the parts were destined for planes in Iran.
In another case, Fokker sent a part from an Iran Air plane to the United States for repair, saying the part belong to an aircraft owned by a Portuguese airline.
Ronald Machen, US attorney for the District of Columbia, said Fokker “treated US export laws as inconveniences to be ‘worked around’ through deceit and trickery.”
But some former officials complained that the practice of small fines was a mere slap on the wrist of violators like Fokker.
Eric Dubelier, a lawyer in private practice who used to be an assistant US attorney and who prosecuted several export cases, told The Washington Post, “What you’re saying is, if you do business with Iran and you earn revenue from it and if we … catch you, all you need to do is pay the money back.”
The Post quoted an unnamed official as saying the Treasury Department did not hit Fokker with a much larger fine because that “would have severely hurt the health of the company.”