Toshiba Corp has won an ally in its battle against Congressional demands that it be punished with severe trade sanctions over its subsidiary’s export of banned equipment to the Soviet Union in the unlikely person of US Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Trade Administration Paul Freedenburg, who told Japanese businessmen in Tokyo he thought it wrong for the US to take it upon itself to penalise a company in a third country: Freedenburg said that many US companies had also broken the CoCom regulations, and that the proposed sanctions against Toshiba would be a bad precedent and could result in foreign countries penalising US companies.