Has Trump’s Cuba policy hit a takeaway thousands of miles away?

The owner of a takeaway who claimed President Donald Trump’s sanctions on Cuba led to £7,000 in payments being withheld said the issue has been resolved.

Carlos Arguelles Leblanch, who owns the Cuban Sandwich Factory, said he believed banking software mistakenly identified his business as one which should be subject to recently stepped-up US sanctions.

Many of his customers come through the delivery app Deliveroo. In his case, when an order is placed, payment first goes through Citibank before reaching him, and this, he claimed, is where the issues occurred.

Citibank said: “The matter required a necessary compliance review, which has now been completed, and the payments have been released.”

Cuban Sandwich Factory opened its doors in Belfast in 2012 and two years later began using the Deliveroo platform.

But when Arguelles Leblanch noticed in recent weeks that payments from orders were not arriving in his bank account he said he contacted his representative at Deliveroo and was told it was an issue with the bank, not the platform.

He temporarily suspended all Deliveroo orders because to do otherwise, he said, would “certainly result in the closure” of his business as he would not be able to pay for supplies and staff.