October 14, 2022
An Iranian immigrant who pleaded guilty in New Hampshire to violating sanctions by smuggling more than $100,000 worth of motors, pumps, valves and other items into Iran has received an unusually long sentence of nearly four years in federal prison.
The US attorney’s office said Aiden Davidson, also known as Hamed Aliabadi, 32, is a dual national. He lived in Brighton, Massachusetts, and was manager of a New Hampshire company called Golden Gate International. Prosecutors said between December 2016 and August 2017, Davidson and Golden Gate smuggled goods from Savannah, Georgia, to a company that operated an online resale business in Tehran. But documents related to the shipments falsely identified the recipient as a Turkish freight company.
Prosecutors said Davidson received approximately $1 million.
Davidson was arrested in 2018 prior to boarding a flight from Atlanta to Turkey. He pleaded guilty and has now been sentenced to 46 months in prison, which is not a record sentence for sanctions violations but is on the high end.
The Justice Department did not say who was the ultimate end-user of the smuggled equipment and did not charge it was going to the Iranian military.
