Exxon won’t have to pay a $3-million fine the U.S. Treasury Department imposed on the supermajor for doing business with Rosneft amid a growing load of U.S. sanctions against Russia. The Wall Street Journal reports that a federal judge this week ruled against the fine, which followed the imposition of the first round of U.S. sanctions against Russia after its 2014 annexation of Crimea. According to the ruling, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control had failed to give Exxon notice of how it interprets the sanctions, which was a violation of the Fifth Amendment. The reason for the fine was that the Rosneft official who signed the joint exploration contract with Exxon, chief executive Igor Sechin, was on the sanction list even though Rosneft itself was not. Exxon quit the project two years ago after its attempts to win a sanction waiver from Washington failed. Even so, the […]