U.S. brings new charges against Chinese tech giant Huawei

The Justice Department has added new criminal charges against Chinese tech giant Huawei and several subsidiaries, accusing the company in a brazen scheme to steal trade secrets from competitors in America, federal prosecutors announced Thursday.

The company also provided surveillance equipment to Iran that enabled the monitoring of protesters during 2009 antigovernment demonstrations in Tehran, according to the indictment, and also sought to conceal business that it was doing in North Korea despite economic sanctions there.

The company issued a statement Thursday night disputing the allegations and calling them “without merit.”

The new allegations come as the Trump administration raises national security concerns about Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer, and aggressively lobbies Western allies to bar the company from wireless, high-speed networks.

The superseding indictment, brought by federal prosecutors in New York, adds to the company’s legal woes in the U.S.

It adds charges of racketeering conspiracy and conspiracy to steal trade secrets to an existing criminal case in that district, where the company already faces charges of lying to banks about deals that violated economic sanctions against Iran.

Federal prosecutors in Seattle have brought a separate trade secrets theft case against the company, while Meng Wanzhou, a senior Huawei executive and the daughter of the company’s founder, is accused of making false representations to banks about Huawei’s relationship with its Iran-based affiliate. She was arrested in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has yet to be extradited to the U.S.

The latest indictment — an update of a case first filed last year — accuses Huawei of plotting to steal the trade secrets and intellectual property of rival companies in the U.S.

In some instances, prosecutors said, Huawei recruited former employees of rival companies in an effort to gain access to their intellectual property.

The company also provided incentives to its own employees to steal from competitors by offering bonuses to those who brought in the most valuable stolen information, and it used proxies — including professors at research institutions — to steal intellectual property, prosecutors said.

The stolen information included antenna and robot testing technology as well as user manuals for internet routers.

One goal of the theft, the Justice Department said, was to allow Huawei to save on research and development costs.