VSSC (Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre) is now our A+ customer.should aim at minimum $500K to $750K for 2006.BDL (Bharat Dynamics Ltd), new stable customer added — $38K till date — look for $75K for 2006”. This is the email that the FBI says was sent by A K N Prasad, the Bangalore head of Cirrus Electronics, to the firm’s US head Parthasarathy Sudarshan who is now in custody in the US for allegedly selling missile and aviation technology to Indian defence organisations in violation of US rules. Also arrested is Mythili Gopal.Prasad sits in his one-room office in a commercial complex housing a bank and other software companies in upmarket south Bangalore. Around noon today, a senior official of the Indian Space Research Organization dropped off a copy of The Indian Express which reported the arrests today. “It’s only then that the full implication of the FBI probe emerged,” claims Prasad, a 62-year-old former chief design engineer at the public sector Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and an Indian Institute of Science alumni. Prasad and Sampath Sundar, the director of Singapore operations of Cirrus Electronics, have also been accused by the FBI of violating export licensing rules and the US Arms Export Control Act. “In 2004 Sudarshan approached me and convinced me to set up an Indian office and I agreed,” says Prasad. “We are not involved in any trading or sale transactions with anyone either in India or abroad. We are providing back office and field support to the company in Singapore, owned by Sudarshan. We are not in anyway connected with the alleged violation,” he said. “We were incorporated on November 29, 2004. Many alleged violations date prior to this,” he said. Prasad said Cirrus India does only liaison work for procurement of electronic components like integrated circuits, drives, memory capacitors, micro- processors, micro-controllers, thermistors, resistors, cables, connectors, power regulators, bridge rectifiers and other electronic components. “The requirements of public sector units like ISRO, ADE, HAL, Bharat Dynamics Ltd, BHEL, were being serviced. We have been servicing supplies to Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre for nearly two years,” he said.“No equipment, machinery or components from banned lists have been supplied. The exports probably required a license. There are many such companies that deal between foreign companies and local buyers. This maybe only a minor violation that will soon get sorted out,” the company’s auditor V L Vardarajan said.According to Prasad, Cirrus Electronics has obtained end-user certificates whenever demanded by the 43-plus US suppliers of components to show that there are no re-exports.“The import arrangement was between Cirrus USA, Cirrus Singapore and the end user. It was done for convenience and there may have been export rule violations. We are not connected to it,” Prasad said.Sudarshan, 46, an REC Trichy graduate, is also a former HAL employee and is described as a “brilliant engineer” by Prasad, his former boss. “Mythili was an employee, she has been needlessly dragged into this,” Prasad said on Saturday. The 36-year-old Mythili Gopal was married to a software engineer, he said.The brain behind Cirrus is Sudarshan, say company officials. The firm was started in Singapore in 1997 “with a focus on sourcing obsolete and military level components”. The head of Singapore operations Sampath Sundar is said to be a relative of Sudarshan. The company gradually moved to become “distributors for all generic and military grade electronic and electro mechanical components from world wide sources”. The US office was set up in 2003. Using his experience and contacts Sudarshan built up a reliable electronic components supply system business, a company official in India said.
