The U.S. Treasury Department announced on Tuesday it has settled with Bellevue, Wash.-based PACCAR Inc., for allegedly violating U.S. sanctions on Iran.

PAACAR, which manufactures medium- and heavy-duty commercial trucks throughout the world, agreed to pay more than $1.7 million to settle potential civil liability for 63 apparent violations of the Treasury Department’s Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations by DAF Trucks, a subsidiary headquartered in the Netherlands.

According to the department, the alleged violations occurred between October 2013 and February 2015, when “DAF sold or supplied 63 trucks to customers in Europe that it knew or had reason to know were ultimately intended for buyers in Iran. The transactional value of the 63 trucks was $5,426,428.”

The department said that the settlement reflected factors including, but not limited to, PAACAR and DAF have not been found to violate sanctions five years before the earliest violation in October 2013; DAF had “a trade sanctions compliance program that included contractual prohibitions on dealers and service partners re-selling DAF products in violation of U.S. trade sanctions”; upon learning of the sanctions violations, DAF internally investigated the matter and fired employees involved in the case, in addition to cancelling the delivery of 20 trucks to a dealer that apparently allowed other DAF trucks to be sold to merchants in Iran; and both PAACAR and DAF cooperating with the department’s probe, “including by submitting a detailed voluntary self- disclosure.”

DAF and PAACAR have taken additional actions, such as hiring a full-time compliance director and enacting “a policy that only allows direct-sales agreements for sales to final-end customers,” according to the department, and imposing a “contractual ban on the resale of new trucks acquired under a direct-sales agreement in the absence of an approved exception.”

Source » jns