BAT paid $635m to close the criminal case. The civil bill is still open.

British American Tobacco admitted in April 2023 that it had violated North Korea sanctions and agreed to pay $635m, about 880 billion won, to the US Department of Justice and the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, the largest penalty US authorities have imposed for a North Korea sanctions violation ^[1][2]. The resolution bought less finality than the price implied: former and current British shareholders formally served a damages claim on BAT's headquarters at the High Court of England and Wales on June 26, and 196 US service members and surviving family members of terror victims are appealing the dismissal of a separate suit ^[3][4][5][6].

The underlying conduct is a decade of stated exit and continued operation. BAT set up a joint venture with a North Korean state-owned enterprise in 2001 and produced and sold cigarettes in Pyongyang ^[7]. As sanctions tightened, it sold its stake and announced its withdrawal in 2007 ^[8]. US investigators found the company effectively kept operating in North Korea until 2017 through a Singapore-based broker and shell companies, with cigarette proceeds routed through shells in China and Singapore before entering the US banking system ^[9][10].

That sequence is what the civil plaintiffs are now working with. The London shareholders argue management failed to properly disclose the risks of the illegal North Korea operations and sanctions violations between 2007 and 2023, and that they lost money in the resulting share-price fall ^[11]. That is a 16-year disclosure window which fully contains the 2007-to-2017 period investigators identified ^[12]. An initial shareholder suit was filed in February; formal service of the complaint and additional claims by institutional investors followed ^[5][13].

The US track is weaker so far. The terror-victim damages suit, filed in January at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, was dismissed when the court granted BAT's motion at a hearing last month, and the plaintiffs appealed immediately ^[4][14][15]. A dismissal is a real win, but the appeal keeps the file open, and appellate revival costs the plaintiffs far less than building the factual record did.

This is the part operators tend to price wrong. A criminal settlement is not only a payment; it is a dated set of admitted facts, produced at government expense, that private claimants can build on. BAT also accepted a three-year deferred prosecution agreement, and its Singapore subsidiary BATMS pleaded guilty and was placed on three years of probation ^[16][17]. On its face that term runs to around April 2026 ^[18]. Meanwhile the company is under antitrust investigation by competition authorities in markets including Belgium and Brazil ^[19]. An industry official quoted by Seoul Economic Daily said BAT appeared to have put its criminal risk behind it by paying the penalty, but that overlapping shareholder disclosure suits and further regulatory probes mean uncertainty over internal controls and governance will persist ^[20].

Three things to watch. Whether the London claim consolidates the February filing, the served claim and the institutional investor actions into one proceeding, which would set the scale of the exposure. Whether the Virginia appeal restores a cause of action for the 196 plaintiffs ^[4]. And whether the expiry of the deferred prosecution agreement is treated as closure or as the start of a period in which BAT no longer has a monitor's paper trail to point to ^[16].