Washington: US President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said in an interview with National Public Radio that he knew in advance about the arrest of a top executive of the Chinese technology giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, according to an NPR reporter on Thursday.
Bolton said he did not know if the president was aware in advance of the arrest of Meng Wanzhou in Canada on Saturday, the day Trump struck a 90-day truce on trade in a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Argentina, NPR reporter Steve Inskeep said in a tweet.
“I knew in advance. That is something we get from the Justice Department,” NPR quoted Bolton as saying.
“We’ve had enormous concern for years about … the practice of Chinese firms to use stolen American intellectual property to engage in forced technology transfers and to be used really as arms of the Chinese government’s objectives in terms of information technology in particular,” Bolton told National Public Radio.
“So not respecting this particular arrest, but Huawei is one company we’ve been concerned about, there are others as well,” he said.
“As the negotiations proceed I think we’re going to see a lot about what Chinese companies have done to steal intellectual property, to hack into the computer systems, not just of the US government, although they’ve done that, but into private companies as well,” the NSA continued.
When asked if Trump knew of the arrest, Bolton said, “You know, I don’t know the answer to that,” Bolton said. “ I knew in advance, but this is something that’s, that we get from the justice department and these kinds of things happen with some frequency. We certainly don’t inform the president on every one of them.”
Reuters has reported that Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies Co Ltd’s chief financial officer was arrested as part of a US investigation into an alleged scheme to use the global banking system to evade US sanctions against Iran, according to people familiar with the probe.
The US has been looking since at least 2016 into whether Huawei shipped US-origin products to Iran and other countries in violation of U.S. export and sanctions laws, Reuters reported in April.
More recently, the probe has included whether the company used HSBC Holdings Plc to conduct illegal transactions involving Iran, the people said.
Companies are barred from using the US financial system to funnel goods and services to sanctioned entities. If the mobile phone and telecoms equipment maker conducted such transactions and then misled HSBC about their true nature, it could be guilty of bank fraud, experts say.
Huawei declined to comment, but said in a statement after the arrest that it complies with all applicable export control and sanctions laws and other regulations.
An HSBC spokesperson declined to comment. HSBC is not under investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter.
(Reuters)