It was another bad week for Huawei: A followers relations executive was arrested on spying charges in Poland on Thursday, and the U.S. Commerce Department blocked shipment of the company’s clobber back to Hong Kong this week. This is on top of the continuing saga of the December arrest of the company’s top finance directorship.
The U.S. government has shown it intends to take action on more than a decade of accusations against the company at a tenuous someday for U.S.-China relations. The moves against Huawei also call into question how the company will be able to unfold the reach of its 5G equipment in the West, and how companies it competes with, such as Apple, may be perceived among Chinese consumers.
Here are the three big circumstances involving Huawei this week and what they mean for the company:
Huawei, long accused of spying, line of work secrets theft and sanctions violations by U.S. intelligence, has denied the bulk of these allegations. Part of the company’s past altercations have been that its executives have never faced formal charges of spying.
That changed Thursday, when Improve law enforcement officials arrested a prominent Chinese Huawei executive in the country, according to The Wall Street Journal. The man, named by Journal sources as a public relations officer and sales executive, was detained along with a Polish government bumf technology official.
The allegations in Poland include that the Huawei executive colluded with local officials to imagine avenues for collecting government information via the company’s equipment there.
Huawei’s research and development company, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Futurewei Technologies, was shut off this week from shipping telecommunications equipment and software manufactured stateside. The Commerce Department called the equipage a security risk.
It’s part of a multipronged effort “to ratchet up the pressure on China,” said Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity gendarme of cybersecurity company Carbon Black and a former top cybersecurity official for The World Bank. “[The U.S. government’s] belief is that the everything of the Huawei supply chain is compromised.”
Huawei has excelled in the production of telecommunications equipment, including equipment meant to cater 5G functionality. But pervasive intelligence concerns, which Huawei has long argued are politically motivated, have led to bans in discrete countries of Huawei’s telecom and 5G equipment, including the U.S., Japan, India and Australia.
The U.S. has until the end of January to file a formal extradition apply for in the highly controversial arrest of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer.
In response to her arrest, China has reportedly captured at least 13 Canadians working in China and has threatened other retaliatory measures should Canada opt to extradite Meng to the Mutual States. Meng has been accused of fraud related to payments allegedly made through international banks between a Huawei supplier in Hong Kong and Iran, a legalized country.
It is unclear whether the Department of Justice will go forward with the extradition request, or whether Canada drive instead try to resolve the matter within its borders. Huawei has denied the allegations against Meng, and most recently, China’s envoy to Canada said Canada’s demand for the release of its detained citizens is an example of “double standards” and “white supremacy.”