Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2663 actions· ✨ 89 recent

On 19 March 2026 the UK Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI), part of HM Treasury, imposed a £390,000 monetary penalty on Apple Distribution International Limited (ADI), the Ireland-incorporated subsidiary of Apple Inc. The penalty relates to two payments totalling approximately £635,000 made in 2022 to Okko LLC, a sanctioned Russian app developer, for App Store revenue. ADI's failure to cancel the payments amounted to conduct in the UK that breached regulation 12 of the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, which prohibits making funds available to a person owned or controlled by a designated person. The enforcement is notable as the **first use of OFSI's new settlement mechanism** (introduced February 2026), which allows OFSI and a subject of an enforcement action to resolve a civil monetary penalty case via time-bound negotiation. OFSI applied a 35% discount to the £600,000 baseline penalty to reach the £390,000 final figure, reflecting ADI's voluntary self-disclosure (made 4 October 2022) and cooperation.

President Lukashenko signed Decree No. 278 on 10 July 2024, extending the prohibitive import customs duty regime established under Decree No. 16 (12 January 2024) through 30 June 2025, preventing its lapse at year-end 2024. The decree also expands the commodity list subject to elevated import duty rates. The measure explicitly frames the duties as retaliatory, targeting goods originating from states designated as "unfriendly" to Belarus — principally EU member states, the US, UK, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and other sanctioning jurisdictions. Co-ordinated with Russia's EAEU parallel-import framework (Resolution No. 506), the regime affects the cost arithmetic for sanctioned-goods routing through EAEU customs-union channels and signals continued institutionalisation of Belarus's counter-sanctions architecture.