Washington has sanctioned a Portuguese firm over helicopter parts bound for Iran
Business United and its owner, António Mira, had their assets frozen after the FBI identified the company as a middleman in a supply chain feeding Iran's military helicopter fleet.
A Portuguese company landed on Monday in a place no Portuguese company wants to be. Business United and its owner, António Mira, were sanctioned by the United States after the FBI identified the firm as an alleged intermediary in operations buying helicopters and components for Pasargad Helicopter Company, an Iranian firm tied to the country’s military fleet.
The designations are administered by the Treasury Department and bite straight away. Assets held in US jurisdiction are frozen, and any transaction with American citizens or companies is barred. For a business built on international trade, that amounts to being unplugged from the financial system.
Six countries, one chain
What the American documents describe is not a single sale but a logistics chain assembled to work around restrictions. Contacts and payments are said to have run through Portugal, Uruguay, Germany, Sweden, Turkey and the United States itself, with Pasargad acting as the way in to PANHA, the Iranian state company that maintains and modernises military helicopters and has been under US sanctions since 2018.
Portugal therefore turns up as a node in a network under federal scrutiny, at a moment when American pressure on Tehran is at its highest in years. We wrote this morning about Iran’s new conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and it is the same board.
Miguel Frasquilho’s response
The story gained a second layer in Portugal because Miguel Frasquilho, former head of the investment agency AICEP and former chairman of TAP, had been associated with the company. The American documents attribute no responsibility to him for the conduct under investigation.
Answering questions from Público, Frasquilho said he had never been a shareholder and never held any stake in Business United, and that he had, in his words, absolutely nothing to do with the buying or selling of helicopters and aeronautical components. He described an informal, non-executive and unpaid collaboration that began in 2023 out of friendship with António Mira, limited to institutional contacts including chamber of commerce meetings and dealings with embassies in Portugal.
No charges have been brought in Portugal, and no domestic investigation has been reported so far. The designations and the grounds cited are published by the US Department of the Treasury.
Photo: Diego Delso / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
