By David Crowe
Brussels: Chinese tech company Huawei is caught in a deepening scandal in Europe after authorities charged eight people with corruption and money laundering, heightening concerns about foreign influence in the European Parliament.
The investigation is emerging as a major test of ethics and integrity in the European Union as campaigners push for tighter controls on money in politics.
The Huawei logo on a building in Copenhagen, Denmark.Credit: Bloomberg
It also highlights the strains with China as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen heads to Beijing this week to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping, a key supporter of Russia in the war in Ukraine.
Huawei has strongly rejected the bribery accusations and the charges are yet to be decided in court, but the case is now the dominant ethics scandal in Brussels after the police raided offices in March and charged individuals in April.
The case centres on allegations that European politicians and advisers accepted money and gifts to help Huawei win approval and contracts in Europe.
The payments were allegedly aimed at overcoming government objections to Huawei to do with the security of its technology and its ties to Chinese state authorities – a concern in Europe as it is in Australia.
When some members of the European Parliament took a hard line against Huawei, thinking its devices could serve the purposes of Chinese security agencies, the company is said to have rallied supporters to its side.
Those friendly to Huawei are said to have sent a letter to European Commission leaders in February 2021 calling for an end to “technological racism” and an open approach, helping the company.
While prosecutors in Brussels did not name those charged, media reports have identified some members of parliament – known as MEPs – and their staff.
The payments reported, however, appeared relatively modest. One report said more than €45,000 ($81,000) was transferred to a lobbyist and this was used to pay €6,700 to a member of parliament and about €16,000 to aides.
Transparency International EU director Nick Aiossa said the charges demonstrated the lack of action in the parliament to stop corruption.
“The allegations that have been reported upon certainly point to a potential complex corruption scheme involving MEPs, their staff, Huawei and other legal entities,” he told this masthead.
In a setback for prosecutors, Italian MEP Giusi Princi went public this month about claims by prosecutors that she attended a dinner with Huawei in Brussels in June last year. She was not an MEP at that time and was in her home region of Calabria on the date of the dinner, attending an event with her daughter.
“To this day I cannot understand how they could have made such a blatant mistake,” Princi told Agence France-Presse.
That mistake raised questions about whether Belgian prosecutors had their facts right – or whether the case should be investigated instead by stronger EU authorities.
Huawei has insisted in statements over several months that it had a “zero-tolerance policy toward corruption or other wrongdoing” and was complying with the law.
Several of the politicians who put their names to the 2021 letter have told the media they received no payments from the company.
Xi Jinping will host von der Leyen in Beijing on Thursday to mark 50 years of diplomatic recognition – the EU’s predecessor recognised mainland China in 1975, 2½ years after Australia did the same – but against the backdrop of rising tensions.
Von der Leyen has warned against China using its vast production capacity to flood markets and ruin competitors, and says it denies fair access to its market for EU companies.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.Credit: AP
“China is running the largest trade surplus in the history of humankind. Its trade surplus with our Union has surpassed €300 billion last year. And this is while it is getting harder and harder for European companies to do business in China,” she told legislators on July 9.
The major dispute between the two sides, however, is Ukraine, because of China’s economic support for Russia and the supply of Chinese technologies that find their way into Russian weapons.
“China’s unyielding support for Russia is creating heightened instability and insecurity here in Europe,” von der Leyen said.
“We can say that China is de facto enabling Russia’s war economy. We cannot accept this.”
The lobbying concerns in Brussels are not only about Chinese influence but the broader question of ethics in parliament after an earlier uproar over payments from Qatar.
Dubbed Qatargate and seen as the biggest scandal of its kind in decades, the affair began with allegations the Gulf state paid members of parliament to curry favour in Brussels. While some MEPs have been charged, the case has not been decided in court.
Corporate Europe Observatory, a non-profit campaign group, has named Huawei as one of the top tech lobbyists in Brussels, with a budget of more than €2 million and 11 full-time lobbyists, according to its own declarations.
“We already have a transparency register at the EU level that repressive regime lobbyists easily bypass because it is weak, voluntary, and poorly enforced,” it said, naming China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Aiossa, from Transparency International, said the European Union had made some progress on transparency, for instance by disclosing meetings between lobbyists and politicians, but was failing on ethics.
“The Huawei case is crucially important because it demonstrates that the European Parliament needs to have much stronger and robust integrity and anti-corruption frameworks in place to prevent these scandals,” he said. “There was a moment in the wake of Qatargate when they could have been brave and brought forward ambitious reforms. They didn’t do it, which has led to the current Huawei scandal.”
MEPs are allowed to have side jobs outside parliament that allow them to receive payments from companies with a stake in laws passed. While the parliament passed resolutions about tightening the rules, these were non-binding. Aiossa said there were few sanctions when rules were broken because the parliament was self-policing.
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