Jay Greene in the Wall Street Journal has a story on the new Huawei story, only slightly different from the first one. It seems to be related to the relationship between Huawei and a lone company Skycom Tech is at issue. Did they own it or not? Before you read the rest of this, read this analysis of how to set up a front company to sell to Iran published in 2016.
SkyCom Tech operated in Iran (there are a lot of companies with SkyCom or some variation in their names) and Huawei claims Skycom Tech was not owned by them. This is a question of fact which should be easy to prove one way or another. Except as the diagram in the article from 2016 shows, the lineage of a front company is constructed to not identify the beneficial owner of the company. Remember that the instructions ZTE used to avoid getting caught by US authorities was used by more than one Chinese company, and Huawei was widely reported as being one of them. I suspect there will be many instances shown in court that can identify the owner of the company. Juries are not as stupid as many attorneys think.
Also, the case with Iran is enough to charge a Huawei official but, the documents show there were sales by ZTE and another company to Iran, Sudan, North Korea, Syria and Cuba all of which have some sanctions. This will only be the beginning. Tracing this kind of activity is slow, tedious work but it looks like it has finally found some things that will be good enough in court.
No comments:
Post a Comment