Northbrook Businessman Gets Prison Time For Illegal Pakistani Exports

CHICAGO — A Chicago technology executive has been sentenced to a year in federal prison for illegally exporting computer equipment from the United States to a nuclear research agency of the Pakistani government.

Obaidullah Syed, 67, of Northbrook, pleaded guilty last year to conspiring to export goods from the U.S. without a license from the Department of Commerce and to submit false export information. U.S. District Judge Mary M. Rowland on Tuesday sentenced Syed to a year and a day in federal prison. Prior to sentencing, Syed forfeited $247,000 of criminally derived cash to the U.S. government, according to federal prosecutors.

Syed owned Pakistan-based Business System International PVT. LTD., and Chicago-based BSI USA. The companies provided high-performance computing platforms, servers, and software application solutions. Business System International was charged in the conspiracy as a corporate defendant. The company has yet to respond to the charges, according to prosectuors.

Syed admitted in a plea agreement that from 2006 to 2015 he conspired with his company’s employees in Pakistan to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act by exporting computer equipment from the U.S. to the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission without obtaining the required authorization from the U.S. Department of Commerce. The PAEC is a Pakistani government agency designated by the U.S. government as an entity which may pose an unusual or extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.

According to prosecutors, Syed further admitted that he and the other conspirators falsely represented to U.S.-based computer manufacturers that the illegal shipments were intended for Pakistan-based universities or Syed’s businesses, when, in fact, the conspirators knew that the true end user of each shipment was either the PAEC or a research institute that trained the agency’s engineers and scientists. In so doing, Syed and his company caused the U.S.-based computer manufacturers to submit to the U.S. government shipping documents that listed false end-users for the U.S.-origin goods, thereby undermining the U.S. government’s ability to stop the illegal shipments.

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