Huawei Bribery Scandal: Five Charged After EU Parliament Raids

Five people are been charged in connection with a bribery investigation in the European Parliament allegedly linked to Huawei Technologies, the Chinese tech giant.

The Belgian prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday the five people charged were detained during raids on 21 addresses by over 100 Belgian police that were carried out last Thursday in Belgium and Portugal.

Four have now been arrested and charged with active corruption and involvement in a criminal organization, while a fifth faces money laundering charges and has been released conditionally.

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The prosecutor’s officer did not disclose the names of those involved or give information that could identify them.

It said new searches had taken place on Monday, this time at European Parliament offices. The European Parliament did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment, Reuters said.

Huawei said last week it took the allegations seriously.

“Huawei has a zero-tolerance policy towards corruption or other wrongdoing, and we are committed to complying with all applicable laws and regulations at all times,” it said last Friday.

The prosecutors have said the alleged corruption took place “very discreetly” since 2021 under the guise of commercial lobbying and involved payments for taking certain political stances or excessive gifts such as food and travel expenses or regular invitations to football matches.

“The alleged bribery is said to have benefitted Huawei,” the prosecutor’s office said last week.

Raids on European Parliament

Offices used by two parliamentary assistants were sealed off, as the investigation progressed, and the European Parliament President Roberta Metsola was notified.

The prosecutor’s office said that the lobbying was “promoting purely private commercial interests in the context of political decisions.”

A joint investigation by Brussels-based investigative news site Follow the Money, plus the Belgian daily Le Soir, and Knack, a Dutch-language weekly, were the first to report that Huawei was the focus of the investigation.

Reporters said the “dawn raids were part of a covert police investigation that started about two years ago after a tip-off from the Belgian secret service”.

Follow the Money said police raided Huawei’s EU office, plus the homes of its lobbyists.

Police were looking for evidence that representatives of the Chinese company broke the law when lobbying members of the European Parliament (MEPs), it said.

MEPs may have been offered “luxurious trips to China and even cash to secure their support of the company” while it faced pushback in Europe.

“According to one source close to the case, ‘around 15 (former) MEPs are on the radar’ of the investigators. For current lawmakers, Belgian prosecutors would have to ask the European Parliament to waive their immunity, in order to investigate further. No such request has been made yet, sources said.”

MEPs want robust action on ‘foreign interference’

Huawei has been facing pushback from Western nations for years, with the European Commission urging the EU’s 27 member states to remove the company’s equipment from their telecom networks because of security concerns.

But some 14 European states have reportedly failed to comply with that recommendation.

On Wednesday, a group of 35 EU lawmakers called on Henna Virkkunen, the European Commissioner in charge of technology, to require member states to exclude high-risk vendors from 5G telecom infrastructure in the wake of the police probe into alleged bribery of MEPs on behalf of Huawei.

They described China’s Huawei and ZTE as “high-risk suppliers.”

Virkkunen said late last year she was not satisfied with the progress in replacing Huawei equipment.