Taminco US Inc., based in Upper Macungie Township, will pay more than $860,000 in criminal penalties after admitting it shipped more than a hundred tons of a chemical used to make methamphetamine to customers in Mexico without knowing who they were.
U.S. District Judge Edward G. Smith on Friday ordered Taminco to pay a criminal fine of $650,000 and forfeit $210,374. The company, which has manufacturing facilities in Florida and Louisiana, also has settled civil claims by the government for $475,000, bringing the total the company will pay related to its mishandling of the chemical to $1.3 million..
Taminco, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tennessee-based Eastman Chemical, was charged last month with mishandling shipments of monomethylamine, a chemical that can be used to manufacture the illegal drug methamphetamine.
Because of its illicit use in the manufacture of the dangerous and highly-addictive drug, monomethylamine is subject to stringent controls and reporting requirements by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Federal prosecutors said that Taminco shipped six loads of monomethylamine to Mexico in 2010 without obtaining proper identification from its customers. When some of the shipments disappeared, Taminco failed to report the losses to the DEA as required by law.
Evidence of barrels from the missing shipments turned up in August 2011 in an abandoned home in San Luis, Ariz. U.S. Customs and Border Protection discovered five barrels from the missing shipments in December 2011 when an individual attempted to smuggle them across the border in Nogales, Ariz.
In April 2012, DEA agents also recovered six barrels of monomethylamine from a storage unit in Nogales.
Taminco’s settled 19 civil claims related to 19 shipments of monomethylamine in the early 2000s and 2010, in which the company failed to verify the existence of the businesses that had ordered the chemical. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia, Taminco was unable to verify that the shipments reached the buyers and failed to report it had lost track of the chemical.
As part of the civil settlement, Taminco entered into an agreement with the DEA under which the company will meet heightened standards for the manufacture, sale and shipment of restricted chemicals including monomethylamine.
The case was investigated by DEA agents in Yuma, Ariz., and Scranton with assistance from Customs and Border Protection. It was prosecuted by assistant U.S. Attorneys Albert S. Glenn and Charlene Keller Fullmer.
Taminco was formed in 2003 as a spinoff of Belgian pharmaceutical firm UCB and in 2006 purchased an Air Products division that produced amines, a class of chemical used in numerous household, industrial and agricultural products.
Eastman, based in Kingsport, Tenn., acquired Taminco in 2014 for $2.8 billion in cash and assumed debt.
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