I’ll jail someone over Huawei leak, says raging Cabinet chief
THE Cabinet official leading the hunt for whoever leaked Theresa May’s decision to let Chinese telecoms giant Huawei build part of Britain’s new mobile phone network has vowed to jail the culprit.
Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill stunned colleagues by furiously slamming his hand down on a desk as he made the pledge.
The leak of the Prime Minister’s controversial decision over contracts for the 5G network – made at a top- secret meeting of the National Security Council last week – has sparked a full-scale inquiry and political row.
A senior Government source told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Mark is determined to have someone arrested for this and only needs a reasonable level of suspicion to make this happen.
‘He’s been looking for an excuse to collar a special adviser for months over leaks – and once you’re in custody, there is no warrant needed for the police to go through your phone. No one in Whitehall will ever come out of that with a job.’
However, there are concerns that Sir Mark has become ‘obsessed’ with Cabinet leaks and has too many demands on his time, having refused to give up his role as national security adviser when he was made Cabinet Secretary. He is also serving as President of the Special Forces Club, a private club in Knightsbridge, West London, for intelligence agents and elite armed forces.
Meanwhile, claims emerged in a new report by two respected US academics last night the Huawei is ‘effectively state-owned’.
The assertion that 99 per cent of the holding company behind Huawei is owned by a ‘ trade union committee’ will further raise concerns that it could be used as a ‘Trojan Horse’ by the Chinese government to disrupt or eavesdrop on Britain’s communication network.
The US report into Huawei, compiled by Donald Clarke, Professor of Law at George Washington University, and Christopher Balding, of Fulbright University, Vietnam, flatly contradicts the telecom giant’s repeated insistence that it is owned by its 188,000 employees.
Instead, a study of publicly available documents shows the operating company, Huawei Technologies, is 100 per cent owned by another company called Huawei Holding. Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei has a one per cent stake in Huawei Holding with the remainder owned by an entity called the ‘trade union committee’.
The academics say Huawei has never revealed any details of the committee’s structure nor who its members are.
‘If the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China, then Huawei may be deemed effectively stateo wned,’ t he r e port c o ncl udes. ‘Regardless of who, in a practical sense, owns and controls Huawei, it is clear that the employees do not.’
Huawei keeps a ten-volume printed register of its employee ‘shareholders’ inside a glass case which it often shows to Western journalists, but the academics say it is a facade.
‘ The t hi c k vol - umes of names and numbers displayed to journalists – paper records, under glass, in a shrine-like setting, at a high-tech company in t he 21st Century – bear every mark of being a Potemkin shareholder register,’ the report claims.
The phrase is a reference to ‘Potemkin villages’ , a ruse devised by the Russian leader of the same name to build painted façades to mimic real villages to give a false impression of prosperity.
In a statement, Huawei said: ‘This report was based on unreliable sources and speculations, without an understanding of all the facts. Huawei is a private company wholly owned by its employees. No government agency or outside organisation holds shares in Huawei or has any control over Huawei.’
But Prof Clarke said: ‘Huawei does not identify any of the sources it believes are unreliable or wrong, or from which we drew the wrong conclusions.’