The post Apple fined £390K for paying a Russian streaming service linked to a UK-sanctioned bank appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

A British financial watchdog has fined an Apple subsidiary £390,000 after the company made payments to a Russian streaming service that was linked to a sanctioned bank. Apple Distribution International, an Ireland-based arm of the American tech giant, directed a UK bank to send two payments totalling over £635,000 to Okko, a Russian video streaming platform. The payments were made in June and July 2022 through a British bank account held by the subsidiary. The payments to Okko are believed to have come from customers who had purchased the app’s services. Under Apple’s payment model, the company collects money from users and then passes it on to app developers, keeping a portion as its fee. How Apple got caught in the Okko sanctions net Okko had been purchased by Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank, back in 2018. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Sberbank became one of the first Russian companies placed on the UK’s sanctions list. Okko was then sold to a firm called JSC New Opportunities, which the UK government added to its own sanctions list in June 2022. A US think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, suggested the sale looked like an effort to move the asset beyond the reach of Western penalties. Both of Apple’s payments came after JSC New Opportunities had already been sanctioned, though there is a chance that at least one of the transactions reflected customer purchases made before the war began. This case is also notable for being the first handled under a new, faster review scheme the watchdog introduced in February 2026. The watchdog acknowledged that Apple had no clear reason to suspect the payments would break the law. It noted that while there were news articles available at the time reporting that Okko was…

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Filed under: News - @ March 30, 2026 5:29 pm