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U.S. charges Huawei with theft and sanctions evasion

The Justice Department partly unsealed a pair of indictments yesterday that accuse the Chinese telecommunications firm of trying to steal trade secrets, evade economic sanctions on Iran and obstruct a criminal investigation into its behavior.

The context: The charges come as officials from Beijing and Washington prepare to continue trade negotiations and as the Trump administration tries to shoulder Huawei out of international efforts to build the next generation of wireless networks, known as 5G. The company has denied the claims; a spokesman for China’s industry and information technology ministry called them “unfair and immoral.”

The allegations: The U.S. says that Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and the daughter of its founder, Ren Zhengfei, participated in a plot to defraud four large banks into clearing millions of dollars in transactions with Iran in violation of international sanctions. American officials say that Huawei tried to impede their investigation by destroying evidence and by moving employees out of the U.S. to prevent them from being called as witnesses. The company, prosecutors say, also stole information about a phone-testing robot called Tappy from T-Mobile facilities in Washington state and encouraged employees to steal other confidential information from competitors.

What now: Matthew Whitaker, the acting attorney general, said that the U.S. government wants to have Ms. Meng extradited from Canada, where she was detained last year at Washington’s request and where officials are now on tricky political turf trying to balance American and Chinese interests. The tussle has the industry on edge; an internal assessment from Deutsche Telekom concluded that the 5G rollout in Europe would be delayed by at least two years and cost billions of euros if governments banned Huawei, whose technology underpins much of the current network infrastructure.