Info:
The Justice Department says a New Hampshire man sold nearly $1 million worth of surplus Defense Department hand-me-down machinery to Iran;
Prosecutors charged Aiden Davidson, an Iranian citizen and a naturalized American, with money laundering, violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, and immigration offenses in the fall of 2018;
Davidson, who also went by the name Hamed Aliabadi, allegedly shipped surplus machinery to Iran using what the Justice Department claimed was a Turkish front company;
Court papers filed by prosecutors claim the investigation kicked off when analysts at the Commerce Department’s export enforcement section noticed that Davidson listed Stare Lojistik as the recipient of shipments from his company, Golden Gate International, LLC. Based in Igdir, Turkey, 30 miles across the border from Iran, and listed Iran as one of a number of countries where it would deliver goods;
Investigators sought and received warrants to search Davidson’s email account and found communications with the owner of a Yahoo webmail account associated with Babazadeh Trading Corporation, which sells hydraulic machinery, and is based in Tehran, Iran. Davidson allegedly forwarded Babazadeh Trading information about a shipment of machinery from the U.S. to Turkey, which authorities interpreted to mean that he was updating the company on the shipment. Babazadeh’s website, investigators learned, also advertised pumps with the same part numbers as those Davidson had purchased as surplus from the Defense Department;
Prosecutors allege that Davidson’s shipments to Iran began in 2013 and continued through 2017. When he filed paperwork indicating he planned to send a delivery of “motors, pumps, valves and other miscellaneous items” to Stare Lojistik in December 2016, investigators from the Commerce Department and Homeland Security stepped in to trace the shipment. They traveled to the port of Savannah in Georgia and installed GPS tracking devices “within the contents” of a shipping container transporting his goods aboard the Zim Tarragona, an Israeli-flagged cargo vessel;
The GPS tracking data allegedly showed the container arrived in the Port of Mersin, Turkey, moved to the Iranian-Turkish border, and had arrive in Tehran by March 2017—without ever reaching the Stare Lojistik facility listed in Davidson’s export paperwork. Investigators concluded that Davidson had caused the shipment to be “diverted to an unknown consignee or end-user” in Iran;
A superseding indictment filed in January 2019 charged Babazadeh Trading in Tehran with conspiracy to violate U.S. export laws and listed “a Turkish freight forwarding company with a location in Igdir, Turkey” as an unindicted co-conspirator;
Also Known As:
Aiden Davidson
Country:
United States
Nationality:
Iranian
Reason for the color:
» Feds broke up alleged scheme to send surplus Pentagon gear to Iran;