The Second Circuit denied as untimely a more than $1 billion effort from the descendants of Cuban bankers to put BNP Paribas and Société Générale on the hook for trafficking misused property under a U.S. law meant to deter investments into Cuba.

A three-judge panel found that Section 6084 of the Helms-Burton Act, which mandates that claims “may not be brought more than 2 years after the trafficking … has ceased to occur,” foreclosed a series of lawsuits filed in 2019 and 2020 challenging financial transactions between the French banks and the state-owned Banco Nacional to Cuba between 2000 and 2010.

In finding Section 6084 to be a “merciless” statute of repose whose filing deadline cannot be suspended by the courts, the panel rejected arguments that a hard cut-off conflicted with the Helms-Burton Act’s goals of deterring the use of property that was taken without compensation during the Cuban revolution.