Huawei accused of 'theft, lies, cover-up' in new trial that claims Chinese company has been stealing US tech for decades

The proceeding has been years in the making. Many will remember the dramatic arrest of the company’s CFO, Meng Wanzhou, in 2018, for bank and wire fraud. In the years since, the Department of Justice has assembled a larger case against Huawei for allegedly stealing trade secrets from at least six brands, including Cisco, T-Mobile and Motorola.

Wanzhou, for one, admitted to misleading a large central bank in 2021, and the charges against her were dropped the following year. But the company that her father founded, and whose finances she still oversees, is in legal hot water.

In total, the brand faces 12 felony charges, ranging from sanctions violations and criminal racketeering to money laundering and fraud, which prosecutors argue paint a picture of a company where “crime is an important business strategy.”

A history of national security woes

Officials have considered Huawei a threat to U.S. national security since 2012, when the White House deduced it “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence — influence that
extended to corruption, copyright infringement, bribery and more, official reports said.

U.S. carriers were banned from conducting business with Huawei starting in 2019, and have also faced further restrictions on the purchase or sale of its hardware — something the company fought with its own lawsuit against the Fed.

As this round of litigation gets going, Beijing has accused the U.S. of “oppressing Chinese companies” and “economic bullying.” Meanwhile, Huawei’s counsel asserted in a statement that “The U.S. government’s overarching narrative is demonstrably false,” as the brand has “the utmost respect for intellectual property.” The company states the bad-faith actions of individual employees, ostensibly like Wanzhou, are being conflated with the ethics of the company as a whole.

Beyond the intellectual property aspect of the dispute, though — in which the DOJ says Huawei “victimized” American companies to gain and industry upper hand — the U.S. government has concerns about the Chinese powerhouse “abusing” our financial system, including by laundering money through, and withholding crucial information about its dealings with Iran from, American banks.

The trial is set to last approximately three months, and will touch on alleged actions spanning from 1999 to 2020.