OFSI has today announced a civil penalty of £15,000 against Tracerco Limited for a breach of the EU’s Syrian sanctions.
OFSI’s Penalty Notice is available here.
The breaches related to airline tickets valued at £2,956.43 purchased for a Tracerco employee through a travel agency. The airline in question, however, was Syrian Arab Airlines which is designated under the EU’s sanctions.
OFSI, therefore, concluded that purchasing the tickets amounted to making funds available to a designated person. OFSI also commented, in relation to the requirement that it showed Tracerco either knew or had reasonable grounds to suspect that the transactions would breach the regulations, that operating in the region was sufficient to satisfy this requirement.