Racketeering conspiracy trial against Chinese tech giant Huawei begins in New York

NEW YORK (AP) — A racketeering conspiracy trial of Huawei Technologies began in New York on Wednesday with federal prosecutors accusing the Chinese tech company of a litany of crimes, including stealing technology from American companies, abusing the U.S. financial system and helping Iran snoop on its citizens.

Huawei is the world’s biggest supplier of gear for wireless telecom networks, but it is banned from selling equipment to U.S. carriers over fears it poses a security risk. It has also been blacklisted by other Western allies, including Canada and Britain.

Taylor Stout, a Department of Justice attorney, opened the government’s case by telling the Brooklyn jury that Huawei committed multiple crimes over two decades.

Defense attorney Brian Heberlig dismissed the accusations, though, saying prosecutors were basing their case on a smattering of anecdotes and some bad behavior by a few of Huawei’s roughly 200,000 employees in 170 countries to cast the company and three of its subsidiaries as a corrupt criminal enterprise.

“There was no blueprint for crime,” Heberlig said, noting that jurors should keep in mind that there were “real people whose careers, integrity are on the line in this case.”

The first witness prosecutors called was Parham Baheshti, who grew up in Iran but moved to the U.S. to study and became a U.S. citizen in 2000. Baheshti, who moved back to Iran in 2003 to be closer to his wife’s family, testified that he fed secrets to the U.S. government about his dealings with Huawei after learning about the tech giant while working in 2009 for a small but fast-growing company that was bringing the internet to far-flung corners of Iran.

Baheshti said he had been excited to try to bring internet access to small Iranian cities, but that he came to believe that Huawei wasn’t going to help.

“They didn’t seem to care about that,” he said. “They had their own agenda.”

He said he found it “infuriating” during one meeting with Huawei workers when he realized that the Chinese company was making a pitch “for analyzing the (Iranian) people and their behavior online.”

Baheshti said he left Iran in 2011 when he was told he was under investigation.

During his opening statement, Heberlig told jurors they would see through what he described as the prosecution’s unreliable witnesses and see that “the government’s claims don’t add up.” He also said they’d find that some of the testimony against the company was fueled by “old grudges.”

He ridiculed prosecutors’ plans to display proof in the courtroom that a Huawei employee took photos of a rival company’s product at a trade show event, saying the government failed to mention that Huawei promptly fired the worker for the “foolish act.”

It wasn’t proof of a “companywide conspiracy,” said Heberlig, who credited Huawei’s remarkable growth to its success in engineering, investment, innovation and competition.

Huawei makes phones and other consumer electronics, but it has been cut off from other lines of business. More recently, it has expanded into chipmaking as the boom in artificial intelligence fuels demand for microprocessors.

During President Donald Trump’s first term, his administration raised national security concerns about Huawei and began lobbying Western allies against including the company’s products in their next-generation high-speed wireless networks. The U.S. announced the criminal charges in early 2019 and has since expanded the allegations.

Chinese officials said the U.S. has engaged in “economic bullying” and improperly used national security as a pretext for “oppressing Chinese companies.”