Gibson Guitar to battle U.S. search of its timber imports

(Reuters) - Gibson Guitar Corp's head boss said on Thursday he would fight a federal enquiry of the famous guitar maker's timber imports after agencies raided the business for the second time in two years.

government agencies raided Gibson amenities in Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee, on Wednesday, seizing wood imported from India, and employees were dispatched home.

In an affidavit, authorities indicated they are weighing allegations against the company or its executives for unlawfully trading wood under a U.S. regulation barring importation of threatened plants and woods. The business has sued to retrieve its house.

"Gibson has obeyed with foreign regulations and believes it is innocent of any incorrect doing," head boss Officer Henry Juszkiewicz said in a statement. "We will fight aggressively to verify our innocence."

Juszkiewicz said the business, which started more than a years before and makes some of the world's most valued guitars, has worked with ecological groups such as the Rainforest coalition to ensure its wood trades are from sustainable causes.

"(The government) has proposed that the use of wood from India that is not completed by Indian employees is illicit, not because of U.S. regulation, but because it is the fairness Department's understanding of a law in India," Juszkiewicz said.

If the identical timber from the identical tree was finished by Indian employees, the material would be legal, he said.

In an affidavit, agency John Rayfield of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said U.S. culture agents in June detained a shipment of sawn ebony logs from India.

The paperwork accompanying the shipment recognised it fraudulently as Indian ebony fingerboards for guitars and it did not state it was going to Gibson, the affidavit said.

In July, agents observed Indian ebony and rosewood delivered to a storage facility for Gibson, according to the affidavit, which inquired consent to seize Gibson's enterprise computers.

Gibson plants furthermore were raided in 2009, when agencies confiscated ebony imported from Madagascar.