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Azerbaijani Diaspora US Export-Import Bankâ€™s approve a loan for financing the Azerspace/Africasat-1a satellite project

29 April 2011 09:28 (UTC +04:00)

Export-Import Bank is, the official export credit agency of the US. The project is going to be a breakthrough for the region and at the same time create about 1,500 American jobs in technology and manufacturing sectors.

The project was started when in June 2010, the Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corporation signed a contract with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies of Azerbaijan to design, build and deliver the Azerspace/Africasat-1a commercial communications satellite.

Based on Orbitalâ€™s flight-proven STAR-2 platform, the satellite will generate approximately five kilowatts of payload power for 36 active transponders to provide services to South Caucasus, Central Asia, Europe and Middle East.

The bank’s approval of the Azerspace/Africasat-1a project financing comes amidst an unconstructive opposition by the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), a Washington-based ethnic special interest pressure group, which sought to block this job-creating project using an irrelevant and ethnocentric agenda.

ANCA’s attempts also seek to deflect public attention from the ongoing military cooperation between Armenia and Iran, specifically, from the recently-discovered Armenian transfer of weapons which were used in the 2008 killing of a US serviceman by the Iranian-backed Shiite militants in Iraq.