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Joyce Eliabachus, 53, was the principal officer and operator of Edsun Equipments, a purported New Jersey-based aviation parts trading company that she ran from her home, U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito said.
She conspired with others in “an international procurement network that surreptitiously acquired large quantities of aircraft components from United States-based manufacturers and vendors and unlawfully exported them to entities in Iran,” Carpenito said.
One of her co-conspirators, Peyman Amiri Larijani, a 34-year-old Iranian citizen who owned an Iran-based procurement firm, used an international network to pursue the parts on behalf of clients in Iran, the U.S. attorney said.
“The network’s client list included Iranian airline companies, several of which have been officially designated by the United States as a threat to national security, foreign policy, or economic interests,” Carpenito said.
One of those companies, Mahan Air, has been subject to sanctions by the United States for providing financial, material and technological support to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force and allegedly ferrying arms and reinforcements to designated terrorist groups, he added.
Together, the conspirators secured at least 49 shipments containing 23,554 license-controlled aircraft parts from the United States to Iran, all of which were exported without the required licenses, Carpenito said.
Eliabachus – also known as Joyce Marie Gundran Manangan – admitted earlier that she used her company to finalize the purchase and acquisition of the requested components from the various United States-based distributors.
She said she repackaged and shipped the components to shipping companies in the UAE and Turkey, where Larijani and other Iranian conspirators directed the components to locations in Iran.
To cover her tracks, Carpenito said Eliabachus “routinely falsified the true destination and end-user of the aircraft components she acquired.
“She also falsified the true value of the components being exported in order to avoid filing export control forms, which further obscured the network’s illegal activities from law enforcement,” he said.
Payment was funneled through Turkish bank accounts held in the names of shell companies controlled by the Iranian conspirators and found their way into Eliabachus’s company’s accounts in the U.S., Carpenito said.
Eliabachus must serve out the entire year and a half because there's no parole in the federal prison system.
In addition to the prison term for her guilty plea to conspiring to violate the federal International Emergency Economic Powers Act, U.S. District Judge Madeline Cox Arleo sentenced Eliabachus in Newark to one year of supervised release.
Larijani, meanwhile, remains charged with violating Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations, conspiring to commit money laundering and conspiring to smuggle goods from the United States.
Carpenito credited special agents of Department of Homeland Security Homeland Security Investigations and the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security Office of Export Enforcement.
Handling the case for the government are Assistant U.S. Attorneys Dean C. Sovolos of the U.S. Attorney’s Office National Security Unit and Sarah Devlin, chief of the office’s Asset Recovery and Money Laundering Unit, with assistance from Trial Attorney David Recker of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.
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