A US District court today rejected the bail application of electronics firm Cirrus’s CEO Parthasarathy Sudershan, who was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on charges of unlawful supply of banned computer chips to three Indian defence establishments including the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre.

The charge was first reported by The Indian Express on April 1.

The court of US Magistrate Judge Deborah Robinson, in his bail application hearing, also denied Sudershan’s request to shift his detention to South Carolina (where his wife and younger son live) from Washington, where he has been put in jail. The hearing went on for nearly an hour. Sudershan, a Singapore citizen of Indian origin, was brought to the court room by US marshals.

Opposing the bail application of Sudershan’s attorney Beattie B. Ashmore, Assistant US Attorney Jay Bratt, who represented the case on behalf of the United States, alleged that Sudershan acted as an “agent of the Indian Government” to procure banned high-tech equipment from US companies for their use in India’s various defense program including ballistic missile.

Charging Sudershan as the “ring leader” and “mastermind” of the entire deal to help Indian get these sensitive technologies, Bratt alleged that Sudershan in a signed statement to the FBI acknowledged that “he was an agent of Government of India, but not a paid intelligence official”.