The U.S. government has moved to end its criminal prosecution of British American Tobacco (BAT) after concluding that the company satisfied the conditions of a deferred prosecution agreement signed in April 2023.
In a filing with the federal court in Washington, D.C., the Department of Justice stated that BAT "fully complied" with the three-year deferred prosecution agreement. The Justice Department said that compliance included the implementation of strengthened corporate compliance procedures and payment of about $630 million, which encompassed both a fine and forfeiture.
The underlying criminal case accused the tobacco group of conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions by facilitating sales of cigarettes to North Korea. According to the Justice Department, the unlawful transactions took place from 2007 through 2017. The department said those sales continued after BAT had spun off its North Korea operations to a third-party firm based in Singapore and publicly announced that it had abandoned sales in North Korea.
BAT Marketing Singapore, a subsidiary of the tobacco company, entered a guilty plea to a conspiracy charge related to the matter. The Justice Department characterized the monetary penalties tied to the case as the largest it has imposed for violations of U.S. sanctions involving North Korea.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell granted the DOJ's request to dismiss the criminal case. The filing and dismissal affirm the department's position that BAT met the obligations set out in the deferred prosecution agreement.
The Justice Department emphasized that North Korea remains subject to a broad regime of U.S. sanctions aimed, in part, at restricting funding for the country's nuclear and weapons programs.
Details provided in the Justice Department filing highlight the transactional and compliance steps the company took under the agreement, while the guilty plea by a BAT subsidiary addresses corporate accountability for the past sales cited by prosecutors. The court dismissal follows these developments and the DOJ's confirmation of completed terms.