The US government on Wednesday sanctioned more than two dozen companies in China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, including offshoots of a US chip firm, accusing the businesses of providing illicit support to Iran’s military or proxies.
The US Department of Commerce included two subsidiaries of US-based chip distributor Arrow Electronics Inc (艾睿電子) on its so-called entity list published on the federal register for facilitating purchases by Iran’s proxies of US tech.
Arrow spokesman John Hourigan said that the subsidiaries have been operating in full compliance with US export control regulations and his company is discussing with the US Bureau of Industry and Security about the listings.
Photo: Bloomberg
These two units are in China and Hong Kong, according to the latest entity list.
The bureau, which is responsible for export controls, added 26 entities and three addresses to its list of firms that US vendors cannot sell to without government approval.
US firms should presume requests to export to the entities would be denied due to national security concerns, the agency said.
Several of the new entity list additions, including Arrow subsidiaries, resulted from the discovery of US-origin electronic components in scraps of uncrewed aircraft systems operated by Iranian proxies since 2017.
Components were found after scrutiny of wreckage recovered by nations in the Gulf and Middle East regions, the bureau said.
The US first weighed restrictions on Arrow as early as 2020 when a different Asian subsidiary was suspected of providing technology to foreign military forces.
Arrow said at the time that the description was an error and the subsidiary was not engaged in military activities.
The bureau sanctioned another five firms on its latest list based on information gleaned from the wreckage of Hamas drones recovered by the Israel Defense Forces after the attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
The debris included components that originated in the US routed through the blacklisted firms, the agency said.
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