US authorities on Wednesday imposed a $300 million penalty on Seagate Expertise, to resolve alleged violations of export controls associated to promoting arduous disk drives to Huawei Applied sciences, the Commerce Division stated.
The producer was concerned within the cargo of arduous disk drives valued over $1.1 billion to Huawei entities regardless of US controls.
The violations, in accordance with the Commerce Division, befell between August 2020 and September 2021.
In 2019, the US added Huawei and a few of its associates to a commerce blacklist that imposed licensing necessities on exports, re-exports and transfers of products.
The Bureau of Business and Safety (BIS) additionally launched controls in 2020 over sure foreign-made gadgets to “better address the continuing threat” by Huawei to US nationwide safety and overseas coverage pursuits.
“Even after Huawei was placed on the Entity List for conduct inimical to our national security, and its competitors had stopped selling to them due to our foreign direct product rule, Seagate continued sending hard disk drives to Huawei,” stated Assistant Secretary for export enforcement Matthew Axelrod in a press release.
“Today’s action is the consequence: the largest stand-alone administrative resolution in our agency’s history,” he added, referring to the BIS.
Regardless of the controls in 2020 imposed by BIS, Seagate stated it might proceed doing enterprise with Huawei, the Commerce Division famous.
“ Seagate did so even though its solely two opponents had stopped promoting HDDs (arduous disk drives) to Huawei, leading to Seagate turning into Huawei’s sole supply supplier,“ the division added.
Based on the bureau’s investigation, Seagate was concerned within the cargo of greater than 7.four million arduous disk drives with out authorization.
