Report: Fiorina Violated Iran Sanctions At HP
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Carly Fiorina’s Hewlett Packard made millions of dollars selling products to Iran through a foreign subsidiary, violating a U.S. ban on such sales.
Fiorina, who served as chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, often criticizes President Obama’s deal with Iran on the basis that he is agreeing to sanctions relief for Iran too quickly and in exchange for paltry concessions on the part of Tehran. In April, she said Iran sanctions were “unraveling fast,” something she called a “dangerous development.”
Fiorina often cites her time as a corporate executive as a credential for running for president and said in July she would back away from the Iran deal if elected and renegotiate. She has also warned that European countries, as well as Russia and China, are rushing “to open the Iranian economy.” She has also accused Iran of cheating on sanctions.
What Fiorina never mentions on the stump is that while she was in charge, Hewlett-Packard used a European subsidiary and a Middle East distributor to sell hundreds of millions of dollars of printers and other computer equipment to Iran.
HP’s unusual omnipresence inside Iran was first reported in 2008 by the Boston Globe, which discovered that in 1997 the company struck up a partnership with a new Indian company in Dubai called Redington Gulf. The partnership was so successful distributing in Iran that HP printers were No. 1 there, with 41 percent of the market share by 2007.
All U.S. companies were banned from exporting to Iran in 1995, when President Bill Clinton issued two executive orders tightening sanctions on Iran in response to Iran’s support for international terrorism and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. If HP executives knew about what the Dubai-based distributor was doing, they would have been breaking U.S. law.
Fiorina denied any knowledge of this during her failed California Senate run, and her presidential campaign has not yet responded to Bloomberg’s Josh Rogan who wrote the story.
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