Mr. Sasan Azodi, mentioned in yesterday’s post, called me just a few minutes ago to give me his side of the dispute between him and Dräger Safety as to who was at fault for the export of the VisioWave security monitoring software to Iran. As you may recall, I questioned why he would be buying the expensive software for Dräger in the first place.

According to Mr. Azodi, the project managers at Dräger for the Irasco security system claimed that they had been blind-sided by the new requirement that the security system would be tested at Dräger’s facilities in Germany. They alleged that they would get in trouble with the company if they now had to buy a second copy of the software for testing in Germany after already having told Irasco it would have to procure the software on its own for the final system. The factory acceptance testing would now require two copies of the software and, according to Azodi, the managers said that they hadn’t factored that into their planning for the project.

I’m guessing that Mr. Azodi’s commission on successful completion of the Irasco project must have been significant if he was willing to dig so deeply into his own pocket to make sure that the project was a success. Yet even if people at Dräger swore a hundred times on their geliebten Mütter’s honor that they would never, ever export the software from Germany to Iran, surely one might have been a bit credulous in the circumstances involved that they could resist the temptation to ship the software to Tehran and be done with it. Even so, Mr. Azodi says he has that promise in writing and that should at least count for something.