China’s ZTE which last month sold Iran’s $130.6 million powerful surveillance system, a new document revealed that ZTE planned American computers sale to Iran, Reuters reports. It was part of an 8 million Euro ($10.5 million) equipment-supply contract, dated June 30, 2011, between ZTE and a unit of the consortium that controls the Iranian telecom.
The documents shows that the equipment to be delivered from China included IBM servers; switches made by Cisco Systems Inc and Brocade Communications Systems Inc; database software from Oracle Corp and a unit of EMC Corp; Symantec back-up and ant-virus software; and a Juniper Networks firewall. The parts were intended for business-support services, including a ZTE billing system.
A spokesman for ZTE said last week in an email told Reuters that “as far as we know” the company had not yet shipped any of the products. Asked if ZTE intended to do so, he emailed a new statement Monday that said: “We have no intention to implement this contract or ship the products.” He also said ZTE decided “to abandon” the agreement after “we realized that the contract involved some U.S. embargoed products.”
The other part of story started the time when the publication tried to contact the companies and interestingly they are unaware that ZTE is supplying their product to Iran. If we see Washington has already banned the sales of such goods to Iran for years and with this, ZTE is supplying more than 20 different US computer companies’ products. U.S. companies that responded to requests for comment said they were not aware of the Iranian contract; several said they were investigating the matter.
