Chinese state-owned companies sanctioned by the U.S. government for illicit arms sales to Iran evaded those restrictions by selling goods to U.S.-based companies, according to a report by a Washington research group.
"Lax enforcement of U.S. sanctions is allowing Chinese companies to continue to ship goods to the United States even after being hit with an import ban for proliferation to Iran," the report by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control stated.
Since 2006, there were 250 shipments to 42 U.S. destinations from companies in China or subsidiaries that were carried out in apparent violation of U.S. nonproliferation sanctions, the report stated.
The report faulted the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control for not properly enforcing some 30 economic sanctions programs because it lacks the resources and funding for monitoring.
Adam Szubin, director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, said in a statement that transactions by U.S. banks with banned entities often "tend to be inadvertent and are corrected quickly upon detection."
"If we see U.S. companies that are knowingly engaging in transactions with a proliferation target or front company, or that those targets are attempting to circumvent U.S. sanctions, we pursue those cases aggressively," he said.
Disclosure of the problems related to sanctions enforcement comes as the Obama administration is weighing new economic sanctions against Iran for its failure to abide by international controls on its nuclear program.
The report reveals that U.S. companies have been receiving prohibited imports from several Chinese companies that are denied access to the U.S. market because of weapons-proliferation sanctions related to Iran's missile and nuclear programs.
One of the companies is the China Precision Machinery Import-Export Corporation (CPMIEC), that U.S. officials in the past described as a "serial proliferator" of missile technology to Iran.
CPMIEC has been the target of U.S. proliferation sanctions since 1991 over its sales of short-range missiles and related technology to Iran and Pakistan. More recent sanctions for its arms sales were imposed in 2002 and 2003.
Bill Gertz is geopolitics editor and a national security and investigative reporter for The Washington Times. He has been with The Times since 1985.
He is the author of six books, four of them national best-sellers. His latest book, “The Failure Factory,” on government bureaucracy and national security, was published in September 2008.
Mr. Gertz also writes a weekly column ...
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