Exclusive
Status: 03/15/2023 10:26 am
A company in Kiel has to pay 1.3 million euros to the state treasury. It had delivered a machine to Russia that was used to build the bridge to Crimea. The company violated EU sanctions against Russia.
The District Court of Kiel has imposed a penalty order on a person responsible for a company in Schleswig-Holstein for violating EU sanctions against Russia. The public prosecutor’s office in Kiel, which had applied for the penalty order, informed him SWR that there was “sufficient suspicion of a violation of the Foreign Trade and Payments Act”. The penalty order is now final. The authority did not say which company was involved.
The prosecution had that SWR previously confirmed that it was investigating the case regarding the delivery of a ram – a so-called hydraulic hammer – for the construction of the Crimean bridge. This can be used to ram piles into the ground.
Employees of the company are also said to have accompanied the use of the construction tool professionally. Opened in 2018, the Crimean Bridge was built after Russia annexed the peninsula belonging to Ukraine. In 2014, the European Union imposed extensive sanctions on doing business in Crimea.
According to the public prosecutor’s office in Kiel, the penalty order includes a fine of 18,000 euros against the person responsible for the company “as well as the confiscation of the assets obtained from the crime against the company”. It is about a sum of around 1.3 million euros. A request from SWR at the presumably affected company remained unanswered.