Huawei dismisses fresh US racketeering charges

Huawei has publicly rebutted the new superseding charges of racketeering and trade secret theft filed by the US Department of Justice.

Officials from the DoJ and the FBI announced the charges against Huawei as well as two of its official subsidiaries, Huawei Device Co. Ltd. (Huawei Device), Huawei Device USA Inc. (Huawei USA), and two of its unofficial subsidiaries, Futurewei Technologies Inc. (Futurewei) and Skycom Tech Co. Ltd. (Skycom). Also on the defendants list is Huawei’s CFO, Meng Wanzhou (Meng), already in detention in Canada fighting her extradition case. The new charges being a superseding indictment means it contains and expands on the earlier charges officially announced in January 2019. As a result, most of cases listed out in detail in the full document are familiar to those following the Huawei vs. USA saga closely.

Huawei denies all the charges. “This new indictment is part of the Justice Department’s attempt to irrevocably damage Huawei’s reputation and its business for reasons related to competition rather than law enforcement,” the company said in a statement. “These new charges are without merit and are based largely on recycled civil disputes from last 20 years that have been previously settled, litigated and in some cases, rejected by federal judges and juries. The government will not prevail on its charges, which we will prove to be both unfounded and unfair.”

The charges broadly fall into two categories:racketeering and breaking US international sanctions.

Most of them fall into the first category. The DoJ alleges that Huawei and the associated parties have violated the 1970 “Racketeer Influenced and Corruptions Act (RICO)”. The law, targeted at organised crimes, lists 35 types of offenses that may qualify as “racketeering”, from bribery and kidnapping to obstruction of criminal investigation by law enforcement agencies and everything in between. In the present case, the DoJ accused Huawei of “misappropriated intellectual property included trade secret information and copyrighted works, such as source code and user manuals for internet routers, antenna technology and robot testing technology”, then, after winning unfair competitive advantages, Huawei and its subsidiaries reinvesting the gains from this “alleged racketeering activity in Huawei’s worldwide business, including in the United States.”

Specifically this category of actions allegedly include “entering into confidentiality agreements with the owners of the intellectual property and then violating the terms of the agreements by misappropriating the intellectual property for the defendants’ own commercial use” and poaching competitor employees the “directing them to misappropriate their former employers’ intellectual property”, as well as “using proxies such as professors working at research institutions to obtain and provide the technology to the defendants.” Huawei is also alleged to have incentivised its employees for obtaining the most valuable competitor information.

When it comes to breaking sanctions, the indictment, updated with more details, is against Huawei and its subsidiaries’ alleged “business and technology projects in countries subject to U.S., E.U. and/or U.N. sanctions, such as Iran and North Korea – as well as the company’s efforts to conceal the full scope of that involvement.”

Meanwhile, the Department of Commerce decided to renew the Temporary General License for Huawei for 45 more days, which means American companies can have another one and half months to do business with Huawei legally while moving “to alternative sources of equipment, software and technology”, the DoC said.

In response to the DoC decision, Huawei reiterated its position that it should be removed the government’s Entity List completely instead of being granted one at a time. Not doing so “has done significant economic harm to the American companies with which Huawei does business, and has already disrupted collaboration and undermined the mutual trust on which the global supply chain depends,” the company said in an emailed statement.

Incidentally, while the DoJ alleged Huawei of using scholars to gain access to advanced technologies otherwise unavailable to it, the Department of Education has launched an investigation into gifts from foreign governments to America’s top universities, with Harvard and Yale being singled out. These two schools as well as other Ivy League and leading schools including Georgetown, Texas A&M, Cornell, Rutgers, MIT, and Maryland, have failed to declare fundings from Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The DoE said since its enforcement efforts started in July last year, $6.5 billion previously undisclosed foreign money has been reported.

The crackdown on the US academics’ links to the Chinese government went up a notch when late last month, Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard University’s department of chemistry and chemical biology and one of the world’s leading nanoscientists, was arrested for lying about his link with Chinese government-sponsored lab in China as well as the hefty payments ($50,000 per month) he received.