Singapore director sentenced for illegal U.S. exports
Laura Wang-Woolford, a U.S. citizen who served as director of Monarch Aviation Pte Ltd., a Singapore company that imported and exported military and commercial aircraft components for more than 20 years, was sentenced Thursday in federal court in Brooklyn, N.Y. to 46 months’ incarceration for illegally diverting controlled U.S. exports to Iran.
She was also ordered to forfeit $500,000 to the U.S. Treasury Department.
Wang-Woolford was arrested on Dec. 23, 2007, at San Francisco International Airport after arriving on a flight from Hong Kong, and has remained incarcerated since then.
She and her husband, Brian D. Woolford, a U.K. citizen who served as chairman and managing director of Monarch, were originally charged in a 20-count indictment returned in the Eastern District of New York on Jan. 15, 2003. He remains a fugitive.
According to the superseding indictment, from January 1998 to December 2007, the defendants exported controlled U.S. aircraft parts from the United States to Monarch and Jungda in Singapore and Malaysia and then re-exported those items to Iranian companies in Tehran without obtaining the required U.S. government licenses.
The aircraft parts illegally exported to Iran include aircraft shields, shears, “o” rings and switch assemblies.
The superseding indictment further charged the defendants arranged for the illegal export of U.S. military aircraft components, designed for use in Chinook military helicopters, to Monarch in Singapore.