Owner of Company Originally Founded in Russia Was Mistakenly Included in Sanctions Report, Treasury Says
The Treasury Department said the founder of a laser technology company headquartered in Massachusetts should not have been included in a 2018 report to Congress that was aimed at informing sanctions decisions, according to a Sept. 11 letter from Treasury. Valentin Gapontsev, founder of IPG Photonics, was listed as a Russian oligarch in a report that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was required to submit to Congress as part of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. The report contained a list of Russian oligarchs and officials that had the potential of facing U.S. sanctions. Gapontsev was born in Moscow, and founded IPG in 1990 in Russia; with a slight name change, IPG Photonics established headquarters in Oxford, Massachusetts, in 1998, according to information found online.
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Treasury clarified the mistake in the letter, saying Gapontsev is a U.S. citizen and CEO of IPG Photonics, a “publicly-traded corporation headquartered” in the U.S. “The United States Department of the Treasury is of the opinion that, if it had to create the unclassified report today, Dr. Valentin Gapontsev would not be listed among the oligarchs in the Russian Federation” for the purposes of CAATSA enforcement, the letter said. “The Department’s view is based on information we did not have at the time the report was submitted to Congress.”
On Sept. 11, IPG Photonics issued a release saying the company and Treasury reached a settlement in litigation over the listing in the report to Congress.