Hobby Lobby has agreed to pay a $3 million fine for smuggling artifacts from Iraq.
Steve Green, the President of Hobby Lobby, said that the company should have been more careful with its purchases of religious artifacts from the Middle East. The U.S. government says that the craft retailer specifically used the wrong labels for packages to get the items into the country.
The fine that Hobby Lobby is facing is due to laws concerning importing artifacts from Iraq. Any cultural property in the country belongs to the country, with just a few exceptions. There are also bans on these imports.
The case of Hobby Lobby importing artifacts from Iraq was discovered in 2011. The company had packages being sent to three different addresses in Oklahoma City, which is where its headquarters is located, reports the Associated Press
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Despite the problems that it has faced, Hobby Lobby says that it is still going to try and conserve religious artifacts from the Middle East. The owners of the company are Christian and Steve Green has one of the largest collections of religious artifacts in the world.
When it first started buying the religious artifacts back in 2010, Hobby Lobby hired a cultural expert to help with the process. This person warned the company that it may be breaking the law if it doesn’t determine where the artifacts were coming from. Now the company has to return the artifacts that are the subject of the case and the Justice Department will determine what to do with them.
As of this writing, William White did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
