Lithuania’s Financial Crimes Investigation Service has imposed a fine of €8.23m for breaches of the EU’s sanctions and a fine of €1.06m for breaches of Lithuania’s Law on the Prevention of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing.
The company fined is UAB Payeer. The press release notes that the company did not cooperate with the investigation and did not provide responses to questions raised.
The investigation commenced after an inspection in 2023 that was conducted after Payeer commenced its operations in Lithuania.
Payeer operated a crypto exchange at Payeer.com which allowed customers to make transfers to or from Russian banks that were designated under EU sanctions.
The AML fine relates to the failure to conduct KYC and the failure to report suspicious transactions.
The press release notes that Payeer had revenues of more than €164m during the 1.5 years of its breaches, but does not note what proportion of this came from prohibited activity.