California Businessman Accused of Selling Restricted Technology to Iran

Source Domain: www.nytimes.com

A California businessman accused of supplying American computer networking equipment to customers in Iran, including organizations tied to the country’s nuclear and military programs, is facing a conspiracy charge, the U.S. Justice Department said.

The man, Jamshid Ghomi, 63, of Newport Coast, Calif., a dual citizen of Iran and the United States, was charged with conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the department announced on Wednesday. Mr. Ghomi is the chief executive of Faraz Pardaz Rayaneh, a Tehran-based technology company.

A federal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California said that, from at least 2011 through 2023, Mr. Ghomi purchased large quantities of American-made technology and routed the equipment through intermediaries in the United Arab Emirates before it reached customers in Iran. That technology could not be legally exported to Iran without authorization from the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Treasury Department.

For more than a decade, Mr. Ghomi, according to the federal complaint, personally obtained large quantities of restricted networking equipment, primarily via eBay, and arranged for their shipment. The equipment included routers, firewalls, switches and modules, manufactured by Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Extreme Networks and Hewlett-Packard, federal prosecutors said.

Mr. Ghomi’s company supplied American-made equipment to the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, the government agency responsible for the country’s nuclear program, from 2017 through 2023, the complaint states. Investigators said the company also sold networking, security and encryption equipment to Iran’s Ministry of Defense and affiliated military organizations from 2014 to 2022.

“Our nation’s laws prohibiting doing business with one of the world’s largest state sponsors of terrorism must be enforced and obeyed,” Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the…

Source