The United States has targeted dozens of front companies suspected by diplomats of links to Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, widely seen as a beneficiary of the sanctions trade.While Iran says it can manufacture parts, the preference was for genuine components, but they came at a price. Everyone takes their cut. "It was state-of-the-art Under the Table’,” Heydar Vatankhah, deputy managing director for engineering and maintenance at Iran’s Kish Air, said of the overall effort.In response, Airbus has agreed to help Tehran comply with foreign regulators and to provide repairs and training: crucial steps as Iran rebuilds its aviation industry from scratch."The Iranians would set up companies to try to do deals and then fold them up. end-of.The company that tried to buy them, registered in a Nicosia apartment with two directors with names that sounded Iranian, vanished from the radar, Kim said in a telephone interview.In December 2012, aircraft trader James Kim received a letter from a company based in Cyprus offering to buy four jetliners. 

 "The level of training and technology in airlines to be able to bring those aircraft in and operate without problems doesn’t happen overnight,” Dick Forsberg, strategy chief of leasing company Avolon, told a panel of Iranian officials. While mastering every nut and bolt of the Boeing 747, its engineers must get used to new types like the A350.After the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions on January 16, Iran’s aviation industry is coming out of the shadows. As they did so, the middlemen prospered. 

The airline, Iran’s largest, was blacklisted in 2011 for allegedly ferrying operatives, arms and funds for the Revolutionary Guards’ overseas unit.With an order for 118 Airbus jets witnessed in Paris by President Hassan Rouhani, Iran moved swiftly to exchange a collection of vintage jets held together with smuggled parts for a new fleet capable of taking on rival Gulf carriers. If this costs $10,000, I had to pay $70,000,” the engineering chief of an Iranian airline said, waving a can of soda to illustrate his point.Suspected front firms sought to trade in spare parts and even whole aircraft, according to people involved in the trade and other experts who mostly spoke on condition of anonymity."Our strategy until now has just been to survive,” Iranair chairman Farhad Parvaresh said. "They (the West) listened to our calls and read our emails; of course we knew that,” said one airline employee.

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