Apple’s European subsidiary has been fined by UK authorities for breaching Russian sanctions.
Apple Distribution International (ADI), the iPhone maker’s wholly owned subsidiary in the Republic of Ireland that is responsible for selling its products across Europe and the Middle East, was fined £390,000 (€449,000) by the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) on Monday after making payments to a sanctioned Russian company in 2022.
ADI paid £635,618.75 to Okko, a Russian online video streaming service, through a UK-based bank in two instalments in the months following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Cork-based ADI also handles Apple App Store services and payments to developers in the UK and European Union.
ADI “voluntarily disclosed the payments in this case to OFSI” in October 2022, the regulator said, adding that “on the balance of probabilities” the Apple unit had breached sanctions on doing business with Russian-owned companies.
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Apple said it took sanctions compliance “extremely seriously”.
“After identifying two payments to a developer that days earlier had become affiliated with a sanctioned entity, we promptly and proactively reported our finding to the UK government,” the company said. “We are constantly working to enhance our already robust compliance protocols, which are consistent with industry standards.”
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The sanction is the second from OFSI this year after the enforcement body fined Lloyds Banking Group in January over its decision to open an account for an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Fines from OFSI, a unit of the UK Treasury, are relatively rare, with fewer than 20 issued since 2019. The Apple fine is the first OFSI case to be resolved through a settlement under a scheme introduced last month in a bid to speed up cases.
It offers discounts on penalties in exchange for subjects waiving their right to appeal the decisions through the courts. Apple faced a maximum penalty of £1 million (€1.15 million) for the breaches, OFSI said, which was reduced owing to the company’s voluntary disclosure of the situation and the settlement discount.
The payments from ADI to Okko are likely to represent payouts from customer purchases of the Russian app’s services made through the iPhone’s App Store, from which Apple typically takes a fee of up to 30 per cent.
Okko was owned by Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, between August 2018 and May 2022, when it was sold alongside other tech assets to JSC New Opportunities, a Moscow-based entity that had been created just a few weeks earlier.
JSC was then sanctioned by the UK in June 2022. Apple’s subsidiary authorised two payments to Okko following the sanction. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026.
