US News

Russian-‘agent’ bust

A Russian-born businessman operated as a secret agent, illegally shipping cutting-edge microelectronics from his Texas-based business through JFK Airport to Russian military and intelligence agencies, federal authorities in Brooklyn charged yesterday.

Ringleader Alexander Fishenko and his 10 co-defendants “spun an elaborate web of lies to evade the laws that protect our national security,” said Brooklyn US Attorney Loretta Lynch, whose office is prosecuting the case.

“The defendants tried to take advantage of America’s free markets to steal American technologies for the Russian government,” said Lynch after an indictment was unsealed.

Fishenko, 46, and his Houston company, Arc Electronic, had allegedly been shipping the microelectronics to Russia since 2008.

Items cited in the indictment were RAM memory chips, microcontrollers and microprocessors that could be used for military purposes — including radar and surveillance systems, missile-guidance systems and detonation triggers, authorities said.

Because of such sensitive uses, the products are subject to government-licensing rules that control their export, noted prosecutors — who have charged Fishenko with acting as an unregistered agent for the Russian government.

To get around those export-control rules, the defendants “went to great lengths to conceal their procurement activities for the Russian military,” prosecutors claimed.

That included allegedly cooking up documents that falsely identified who the end users would be, concealing that the items would be exported, and misclassifying items on records submitted to the US Commerce Department.

“Arc claimed to American suppliers that . . . it merely manufactured benign products such as traffic lights,” authorities said.

In one instance, Arc’s procurement director, Alexander Posobilov, 58, allegedly instructed a Russian procurement company to make sure the end-user certificate said that “fishing boats, and not fishing/anti-submarine ones” were going to be using the microelectronics, authorities said.

Authorities said that the Moscow-based company Apex System — which is partly owned by Fishenko and also is charged in the case with Arc — is certified by Russia’s Defense Ministry to procure and deliver military equipment and electronics.

dan.mangan@nypost.com