Virginia Man Used US Freight Forwarders to Illegally Export to Iran, DOJ Says
Jalal Hajavi of Virginia was sentenced to two years in prison and three years of supervised release after he illegally exported heavy equipment from the U.S. to Iran, DOJ announced this week. Hajavi also misled a U.S. freight forwarder about the “ultimate destination” of the shipment, DOJ said, which caused the forwarder to file false export information to the Commerce Department.
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DOJ said Hajavi worked with another person in Iran to illegally ship heavy machinery, using U.S. freight forwarders to send the items to the United Arab Emirates before he organized their shipment into Iran. The agency also said Hajavi didn’t have the required Office of Foreign Assets Control licenses to ship the items, and at one point he met with a special agent from the Bureau of Industry and Security, who warned him about illegally transhipping items through third countries to Iran.
Despite meeting with the BIS agent, he “continued his unlawful conduct,” DOJ said. In one case, he bought an “Ingersoll Rand Blasthole Drill” from an American and used a U.S. freight forwarder to ship the drill to the UAE, DOJ said. Hajavi didn’t mention the drill would then be sent to Iran, so the information the forwarder filed in the Automated Export System was false.
Hajavi’s “conduct was particularly egregious” because he was told by a BIS agent that his exports were illegal, said Ryan Buchanan, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. Matthew Axelrod, the top export enforcement official at BIS, said the sentence shows that “when proliferators falsify export records to support illicit Iranian procurement schemes, they get caught and they do prison time.”
Hajavi was convicted in September 2023 of conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations, smuggling, and illegally exporting and reexporting goods from the U.S. to Iran without a license.