The fourth-largest telecommunications company in the world, ZTE Corporation (ZTEC), is under criminal investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for selling American-built surveillance products to Iran, a website has reported.
The investigation was triggered by a Reuters news story in March, that the company illegally shipped hardware and software purchased from US tech firms to Iran, a transaction worth up to $130.6 million.
According to the Reuters story, the technology was a “powerful surveillance system capable of monitoring landline, mobile, and Internet communications,” far more capable of monitoring citizens than other equipment purchased by the Iran government.
The website Smoking Gun has now published nine pages of what it said is a confidential FBI affidavit establishing probable cause.
The affidavit details that in December 2011 the general counsel of ZTEC’s America-based subsidiary worked with company lawyers to “identify ways ‘pursuant to US law’ that ZTEC could sell phones containing US-manufactured components to ‘banned’ countries”.
One of the compliance attorneys “proposed the creation of sub-companies that would buy US-made components subject to the embargo and other export restrictions directly from the US manufacturer”, said the online document.
Once the investigation began, according to a witness statement, the company looked to shred documents and change the packing list, to claim that the goods had never been sent to Iran, and that “the equipment either was in warehouses in the PRC or had been shipped to non-embargoed countries.”
In April this year President Obama issued an executive order blocking property and suspending entry into the US of any entity that provided technology to Iran or Syria likely to be used to facilitate computer or network monitoring or tracking that could assist in or enable serious human rights abuses by the Governments of Iran or Syria.
