Havana, Cuba.- The United States intensified in the last year its persecution of the banking and financial operations of Cuba with entities linked to the island, an official report recorded here.
This is the report on resolution 73/8 of the United Nations General Assembly entitled ‘Need to end the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba’.
The document will be debated at the UN in November, on the twenty-eighth occasion in which the General Assembly will rule on the siege policy that Washington applies for almost six decades against the Caribbean nation.
The report records the damages to Cuba by that policy between April 2018 until March 2019 and counts losses on the Cuban economy for four billion 343.6 million dollars.
It includes effects on the island and companies from third countries, including the US, punished in accordance with the provisions of the blockade and the Helms-Burton Act, adopted by the US Congress in 1996.
The report that accompanies the draft resolution presented at the United Nations accounts for the fine of over five billion dollars issued against JP Morgan Chase bank for ‘carrying out transactions and providing unauthorized services to clients included in the List of Persons Especially Designated and Blocked between 2008 and 2012 ‘.
It adds that on November 19, 2018, the banking-financial group Société Générale S.A. based in Paris, France, agreed to a total payment of $340 million 916 dollars to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the United States Department of the Treasury.
The crime committed was to process transactions involving Cuba between July 11, 2007 and October 26, 2010.
Such penalty is the second largest imposed on a financial institution for relating to Havana, the document notes.
Also on April 1, 2019 the Panamanian entity Multibank closed bank accounts of companies in that country and other latitudes that trade or have relations with the greater of the Antilles.
Among the accounts closed was that of the correspondent of Prensa Latina in Panama City.
On April 15, 2019, OFAC imposed penalties on the European subsidiaries of Unicredit Group in Germany, Austria and Italy for violations of the Regulations for the Control of Cuban Assets and other sanction programs applicable to Myanmar, Sudan, Syria, Iran and Libya .
As a consequence, and in order to avoid a civil lawsuit, Unicredit Bank Ag agreed to pay 553 million 380 thousand 759 dollars, Unicredit bank Austria AG for 20 million 326 thousand 340 dollars and Unicredit S.P.A. of 37 million 316 thousand 322 dollars to OFAC and other government and state institutions of the United States.
According to Havana, the damages accumulated by the blockade of the United States total more than 138 billion 843 million dollars at current prices.
The human damage to the Cuban people cannot be accounted for, said the island’s Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodríguez, when recently presenting in this capital the report that will be debated at the United Nations.