A woman who was head of the Chinese unit of a US manufacturer was charged with illegally exporting high-performance coatings for Pakistan’s nuclear industry, officials said on Friday. Xun Wang, a former managing director of PPG Paints Trading in Shanghai, a Chinese subsidiary of United States-based PPG Industries, Inc, was indicted on a charge of conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and related offenses.
The Justice Department said Wang, 51, made her initial appearance on Thursday, in US District Court in Washington as a federal grand jury returned a sealed indictment charging her. Wang is accused of conspiring to export and re-export, and exporting and re-exporting specially designed, high-performance epoxy coatings to the Chashma 2 Nuclear Power Plant (Chashma II) in Pakistan, in violation of US sanctions.
A Chinese national and lawful permanent US resident, Wang was arrested on the indictment on June 16 at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. The indictment is related to the December 21 guilty plea of PPG Paints Trading to a four-count information in the investigation.
PPG Paints Trading and its parent company, PPG Industries, paid $3.75 million in criminal and administrative fines and more than $32,000 in restitution, one of the largest monetary penalties for export violations in US history.
In 1998, the United States placed the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission on a list of banned entities following Pakistan’s first successful detonation of a nuclear device.
According to the indictment, PPG Industries sought an export license in 2006 to ship coatings to Chashma II but was denied.
“Following that denial, Wang and her co-conspirators agreed upon a scheme to export and re-export the high-performance epoxy coatings from the United States to Chashma II, via a third-party distributor in People’s Republic of China,” a Justice Department statement said.
The indictment alleges that, through these means, Wang and her co-conspirators exported three shipments of coatings from the United States to Chashma II without the required Department of Commerce license.
