Singapore Men Sentenced in Plot to Export U.S. Military Antennas

CBS DC ^ | 09/21/2013 | CBS DC

[TexGrill]

WASHINGTON — Two Singapore men were sentenced Friday in federal court in Washington for their roles in plots to illegally export 55 military antennas from the United States to Singapore and Hong Kong.

Lim Kow Seng, also known as Eric Lim, and Hia Soo Gan Benson also known as Benson Hia, were sentenced to 37 months and 34 months in prison, respectively. They pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy to defraud the United States by dishonest means.

Seng, 44, and Hia, 46, were arrested in Singapore in 2011 and extradited to the U.S.

According to court documents, the two and others conspired to defraud the United States by illegally exporting 55 cavity-backed spiral antennas and biconical antennas from a Massachusetts company to Singapore and Hong Kong without the required State Department license.

The antennas are controlled for export as U.S. munitions and are used for airborne or shipboard direction finding systems or radar warning receiver applications. Some are also used in military aircraft.

[TexGrill]

Global business tip

[353FMG]

“....defraud the United States by dishonest means.”

.
That’s a double whammy — why can’t people defraud the system by honest means like government does?

[Tainan]

The facts are, this type of thing, the buying and shipping of "Export Controlled Items" is an almost everyday occurrence.

While the Feds, the USAF Intel/Mil Police, are incredibly good at rooting out and stopping this action, they are, for the most part, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the actors involved in this.
This is not a new activity. It has been going on, on a state sponsored level, since the mid-70s and before.
The main sponsors of this are the PRC/PLA and the CCCP. Formerly active involvement by the East Germans and USSR actors is merely a trickle of what it once was.

The Chinese have found it easy to insert agents at the universities and businesses that deal with this technically sensitive materiel - have them either steal it outright, or copy the instructions to build it and hidey-ho back to the Great Socialist Motherland with the technical details.

Bidness as usual...;)

[doorgunner69]

Suspect the ChiComs wanted them to reverse engineer existing hardware.

They are not very mysterious antennas to design from scratch, plenty of literature out there.

[Carriage Hill]

“...conspiracy to defraud the United States by dishonest means...”

I know it’s early, and even with coffee, I had to re-read that 3x.