Ex-HAL staffer pleads guilty in US to illegal exports for Indian missile programme

He will be sentenced on June 16, a statement from the US Justice Department said today.

As first reported in The Indian Express in March last year, the 47-year-old Sudarshan and one of his associates, Mythili Gopal, were arrested by the FBI for alleged export of sensitive dual-use items to three Indian organizations dealing in space technology and defence production without obtaining the necessary licenses from relevant US offices.

“The defendant participated in a clandestine network that circumvented our export laws and put sophisticated technology in the hands of foreign companies that were listed as end-users of concern for proliferation reasons,” Jeffrey A Taylor, US Attorney for the District of Columbia was quoted as saying in the statement.

The components, exported between 2002 to 2006, included special heat-resistant computer chips with applications in missile guided systems, capacitors, semi-conductors, rectifiers, resistors and microprocessors for use in aircraft navigation systems. The components could have been used in the production of missiles and missile-launch vehicles, and also in the development of the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft.

The recipients of these electronic items were the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in Trivandrum, a unit of the Department of Space, Bharat Dynamics Limited (BDL) in Hyderabad, which comes under the Ministry of Defence, and Aeronautical Defence Establishment (ADE), a laboratory of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

VSSC and BDL figure on the US Department of Commerce’s Entities List, which means that exports to these institutions are restricted and require prior authorization from US authorities. Exports of items like the one supplied to ADE is governed by the Arms Export Control Act and requires a license from the Directorate of Defence Trade Controls (DDTC) of the US State Department.

A graduate of REC Trichy and an ex-employee of Hindustan Aeronautical Limited in Bangalore, Sudarshan, who is now a resident of Simpsonville, South Carolina, had founded Cirrus Electronics in Singapore in 1997. The South Carolina office was started in 2003.

It has been alleged that Cirrus Electronics obtained orders from the Indian institutions to procure certain electronic items from US vendors and placed orders for these items with the vendors without revealing the end-user. In case the vendor asked for the end-user certificate, false certificates were furnished.

“One of the highest enforcement priorities of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security is ensuring that dual-use items don’t end up in dangerous hands,” said Daryl W Jackson, Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement, U.S. Department of Commerce. “This case demonstrates that we will take action against those exporters who evade our export control system,” he said.

VSSC to ADE: who got what

•Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre: Four different kinds of Static Randam Access Memory (SDRAM) computer chips and five types of capacitors

•Bharat Dynamics Limited: Capacitors, semi-conductors, rectifiers and resistors for missile systems

•Aeronautical Defence Establishment: i960 Intel microprocessors for Tejas aircraft manufacture