Huawei accuses US of cyberwar, entrapment, and harassment
Huawei has vehemently rejected US allegations of technology theft and patent infringement, and accused US authorities of harassing its staff.
In an astonishing broadside, Huawei said the US Department of Justice (DoJ) probe into the company, reported by The Wall Street Journal, was part of an effort to disrupt its business.
Huawei also claimed that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had sent agents to its employees homes and “pressured them to collect information on the company”.
Earlier this week, reports surfaced that the DoJ was investigating additional claims of technology theft.
The DoJ charged Huawei in January this year with stealing confidential information from T-Mobile and other US competitors.
Huawei has now hit back with claims that US authorities have engaged in cyber attacks on the company, and “menaced” its employees.
“The fact remains that none of Huawei's core technology has been the subject of any criminal case brought against the company, and none of the accusations levied by the US government have been supported with sufficient evidence,” the Chinese company said.
“No company becomes a global leader in their field through theft,” it added.
DoJ ‘vendetta’
Huawei also said that US prosecutors had been “digging up old civil cases that have already been settled, and selectively launching criminal investigations or filing criminal charges against Huawei based on claims of technology theft”.
This comes as a Chinese professor last week pleaded not guilty to one charge of wire fraud in a case related to Huawei’s alleged theft of trade secrets from US company CNEX Labs.
Bo Mao, a former professor at Xiamen University in China, was arraigned at the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York last Wednesday, August 28.
According to the latest criminal charges, first filed at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas last month, Mao colluded with a Chinese “telecommunications conglomerate” to steal trade secrets from a US company based in the northern district of California.
Prosecutors said that Mao fraudulently obtained a computer circuit board from the US company under false pretences of conducting research.
Mao then violated a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and passed confidential information about the US company’s technology to the Chinese firm, the complaint said.
These allegations closely resemble those brought in a previous civil case which found Huawei liable for trade secrets theft.
In that case, US semiconductor company CNEX Labs accused the Chinese telecommunications company of recruiting Mao to steal proprietary information.
In June, a Texas jury found that Huawei had misappropriated CNEX’s trade secrets, but declined to make an award of damages to the US company.
CNEX claimed that, at the behest of Huawei, Mao requested a copy of one of the US company’s circuit boards as part of a research project.
According to CNEX, Mao then passed technical information about the circuit board to Huawei, despite having signed an NDA.
Huawei has challenged the veracity of the criminal allegations, remarking in separate court documents that “Mao faces charges based on inaccurate information that CNEX apparently fed to the government—some of the same information that the [Eastern Texas district court] has already found not to be reliable or not to be admissible”.
Tit-for-tat suits
The dispute between the two companies initially began with Huawei accusing Ronnie Huang, a co-founder of CNEX Labs, who previously worked for the Chinese company, of stealing its own trade secrets.
The Texas jury rejected these claims in its verdict in June, but did find that Huang violated a patent application disclosure provision.
CNEX is currently seeking a new trial on the issue of damages, which Huawei has opposed.
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