TULA. Jan 26 (Interfax-AVN) - The Instrumentation Design Bureau, Tula, Russia, denies the U.S. Department of State's accusations of having traded arms with Iran and Iraq, and regards sanctions against itself as an attempt to complicate military- technical cooperation between the Bureau and foreign countries, including the U.S., IDB press secretary Valeri Vozbranny told Interfax-Military News Agency Monday.
"Since the firm was granted a right to conduct independent international trade in 1996, we have signed no contracts with Iran or Iraq for military hardware supplies. Hence, we have not supplied anything there. Moreover, in accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation, the authorities of the countries we signed contracts with gave us end-user certificates, i.e. committed themselves to not trading or in any other way transferring these weapons to other states. We are not aware of any facts of violation of these commitments," reads the letter designer general and chief of IDB Arkady Shipunov has sent to the U.S. Department of State.
Shipunov wrote that IDB trades internationally under strict state surveillance. "We are sure that U.S. intelligence services and the U.S. Department of State know that our firm has not supplied any weapons to Iran and Iraq. As to repeated ungrounded superficial accusations of GUP KBP (the Russian abbreviation for IDB - Interfax-AVN), they can only be regarded as an intention to complicate our military-technical cooperation with foreign countries, including the U.S.," he also wrote in the letter.
The London International Institute for Strategic Studies published a report in October 2003 which testified that state monitoring of Russian conventional arms export is as efficient as could be. Nevertheless, late last week Shipunov received a letter from the U.S. Department of State, which officially notified him that the Department of State had decided to impose sanctions on IDB.
The letter reads that the firm and its arms trade transactions had been thoroughly analyzed, and as a result the Department of State had found that IDE had supplied lethal weapons to Iran, a country the U.S. officially declares a state sponsoring terrorism, and decided to impose sanctions on the firm until September 29, 2004.