Author: Raymond Zhong / Source: New York Times
As chief financial officer of Huawei, Meng Wanzhou has played a part in the company’s efforts over the past five years to become more transparent about its operations. Alexander Bibik/Reuters
BEIJING — As Huawei’s finance chief and daughter of its founder, Meng Wanzhou has been a polished, professional face for a huge technology firm that long was opaque to the outside world.
Ms. Meng, the eldest daughter of Ren Zhengfei, the leader of the telecom equipment maker, has appeared before reporters to announce the company’s financial results. She has spoken at company events in New York; Cancún, Mexico; and beyond. She helped inaugurate centers in Britain, a key market for the Chinese giant’s expansion into the Western world.
She also sat on the board of a Huawei partner company in Hong Kong called Skycom Tech that Canadian authorities now say did business in Iran. And through that position and her job at Huawei, Ms. Meng may have personally been involved in tricking financial institutions into making transactions that violated United States sanctions against Iran, they said.
That has thrust Ms. Meng, 46, into the center of what promises to be a complex diplomatic tussle between the United States and China. She was arrested Dec. 1 in Vancouver, Canada, while changing flights, at the request of the American government, which is seeking to extradite her. The action escalated what had already been a roller-coaster year of economic conflict between the two powers, ahead of tricky negotiations to end a brutal trade war.
Huawei has said that it is not aware of any wrongdoing by Ms.
Meng, and China’s Foreign Ministry has called for her immediate release.But on Friday, in a bail hearing in British Columbia’s Supreme Court, Canadian authorities said Ms. Meng was accused of fraud. They said she had “direct involvement” with Huawei’s representations to banks, telling at least one financial executive that Huawei and Skycom were operating in Iran in strict compliance with United States sanctions when that was not the case.
Larry Kudlow, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said on CNBC on Friday that the United States had repeatedly warned Huawei about violating sanctions on Iran.
“We have these sanctions on Iran, it runs against our policy, why shouldn’t we enforce that?” he said.
For years, Ms. Meng’s name has appeared in connection with Huawei’s business in Iran, the subject of a yearslong United States investigation.
Ren Zhengfei, center, president of Huawei, with China’s president, Xi Jinping, in London in 2015.
Reuters reported several years ago that Skycom, one of Huawei’s partners in that country, had tried to sell Hewlett-Packard equipment to an Iranian telecom carrier in 2010. The sale, which Huawei said was never completed, would have violated Washington’s ban on exporting computer products to Iran.
Huawei said at the time that its Iranian business was entirely lawful, and that it required its local partners to heed the same laws and regulations.
According to Hong Kong corporate filings, Ms. Meng was a member of Skycom’s board from February 2008 to April 2009.
In a May…
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