On Friday March 26th, the coalition STOP THE BOMB will hold a protest rally against the business ties of Austrian companies with Iran at the annual shareholders' meeting of the Graz-based engineering company Andritz. From 9:30am coalition activists will gather in front of the Graz Congress Center to inform the shareholders about the character of the Iranian regime and the company's business with Iran. Experts claim that Andritz has been involved in projects associated with companies belonging to the Revolutionary Guards. "The Revolutionary Guards are the elite troops of the regime. Not only do they control the missiles and nuclear programs, they have also been significantly involved in the brutal crackdown on the Iranian freedom movement during the last months", says STOP THE BOMB spokesperson Simone Dinah Hartmann. "It is nearly impossible for companies to rule out that they are doing business with companies of the Revolutionary Guards as the latter meanwhile dominate the Iranian economy and control up to 80 percent of the Iranian foreign trade."

Andritz, a globally operating company with more than 13 000 employees, has its own representation in Tehran and was still selling goods to Iran in 2009. The Austrian embassy in Tehran features the company's products on its website. For years, Andritz has supplied the Kharkeh project with generators; a project mainly run by Khatam al Anbiya, a consortium affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards.