How Huawei’s lobbying campaign in Europe went rogue
Once a high-flyer in Europe, Huawei’s growth stalled due to concerns over its ties with Beijing. As the Chinese tech giant fought for survival, its EU lobbying campaign took a dark turn.
This article in 1 minute
What is this story about?
- Huawei lobbyists in Brussels have allegedly bribed members of the European Parliament. Belgian police raided 21 addresses linked to the corruption probe this morning, people close to the investigation told Follow the Money and Belgian outlets Le Soir and Knack.
- The Belgian investigation, codenamed “Generation”, has been ongoing for over two years after a tip-off from Belgian intelligence. The probe echoes the Qatargate scandal revolving around bribery allegations involving several MEPs.
- Huawei has fought to retain access to European markets after being driven out of the US over fears that the company’s links to the Chinese government make it a security risk. Huawei lobbyists made thinly-veiled threats to European lawmakers against excluding the company’s products, according to documents obtained by Follow the Money.
Why is it important?
- Huawei is one of the biggest producers of mobile phones and telecommunications equipment in the world. But the company and its role in 5G networks have become caught up in the geopolitical confrontation between the US, Europe and China.
- The corruption probe into Huawei’s lobbying practices is likely to increase scrutiny of the company, which already faces bans or restrictions for its 5G equipment in 12 of the 27 EU member states.
How did FTM investigate this?
- Follow the Money and its Belgian media partners Le Soir and Knack have spoken to multiple sources with knowledge of the judicial probe and with former Huawei employees, as well as obtaining documents about Huawei’s lobbying through freedom of information requests.
This article is part of an ongoing series.
The EU FilesFor over two years, Belgium’s federal authorities have been monitoring current and former EU lobbyists for the Chinese tech giant Huawei as part of a wide-ranging corruption probe. Today, they raided the residences of several people suspected to be connected to the case.
Investigators believe Huawei lobbyists may have committed crimes by bribing members of the European Parliament (MEPs) with expensive football tickets, lavish gifts, luxurious trips to China and possibly even cash money, in exchange for their vocal support of the company at a time when it has faced growing scrutiny and pressure from the European Commission and EU member states.
The covert investigation into allegations of bribery, forgery, money laundering and criminal organisation became public today after the raids involving various lobbyists. According to one source close to the case, “around fifteen (former) MEPs are on the radar” of the investigators.
The Belgian federal prosecutors’ office confirmed that Thursday’s raids are part of an investigation into possible corruption at the European Parliament. The state security service declined to comment.
Huawei could not immediately be reached for comment on the raids.
Huawei is believed to be one of the tech industry’s biggest lobbyists in the EU capital
The Huawei probe is led by the same police service that, in 2022, started looking into allegations that the governments of Qatar and Morocco had bribed MEPs and their assistants. Legal proceedings over the Qatargate scandal are ongoing, with several suspects charged with corruption, money laundering and criminal organisation.
The raids on the Huawei lobbyists raise further questions about MEPs' susceptibility to corruption and the EU’s vulnerability to foreign influence, as well as the Commission's drive to restrict Huawei and other vendors it considers a security threat from 5G networks.
The US and other Western governments have long been warning that building the mobile networks of the future with Huawei’s equipment amounts to an incalculable risk to their security. That’s because, in their view, Chinese-made equipment could create vulnerabilities which would give the Chinese government an entry point for spying on Europeans.
Huawei has repeatedly denied allegations of espionage and interference from Beijing.
“The Chinese government does not interfere with our business or the security of our products,” its website reads.
© Eline Schipperen
The threat of losing market access in Europe has prompted the tech behemoth to ramp up its lobbying campaign in Brussels in recent years – including by trying to influence some of the EU’s top officials.
Based on interviews with investigators, ex-Huawei staff, and documents obtained from the Commission and member states, an investigation by Follow the Money, Belgian news outlets Le Soir and Knack and Reporters United in Greece reveals how Huawei lobbyists used their political connections in an influence operation that targeted the heart of European politics.
Any reference to individuals in this story does not mean they are under investigation by Belgian authorities.
Washington’s hit on Huawei
When Huawei threw a lavish bash in Brussels to celebrate Chinese New Year in February 2019, the company was riding high. It was firmly entrenched in Europe with a large market share in telecom equipment and smartphones – for the latter, almost 20 per cent at the time.
Yet the festive atmosphere soon turned sour when Abraham Liu, Huawei’s vice-president for Europe, took the stage at the party and referred to remarks by US envoy Gordon Sondland.
That very day, the American diplomat had warned European countries that the Chinese state could use 5G equipment produced by its companies in order to spy on Europeans.
Liu hit back.
Sondland’s remarks were an “insult to people’s intelligence”, Liu said on stage. “We are shocked, or sometimes feel amused, by those ungrounded and senseless allegations.”
Washington clearly wasn’t listening.
A couple of months later, the US government added Huawei to a trade blacklist. As a result, Google barred the Chinese firm’s access to key features of its Android operating system.
This dealt a severe blow to the company: ever since, new Huawei devices have been shipped without Google’s Android operating system and its app store, meaning that they lack popular apps such as Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube.
Huawei’s phone sales plummeted; its market share for mobiles in Europe fell to 5 per cent within just a few years. The company focused on its main remaining big business: selling telecoms equipment to Europe’s network giants.
But this avenue also became increasingly difficult as Western intelligence services and experts warned about the security risks surrounding Huawei (see box)
With European countries moving to roll out the new, faster 5G standard, Huawei’s EU lobbying operations made it a priority to protect the company’s network business – a market expected to earn global operators a whopping 225 billion euros in revenue this year.
Western security experts and services, including Dutch intelligence, have long warned of spying risks in relation to Huawei. The company has denied cooperating in espionage by the Chinese state and concrete evidence of “back doors” in its equipment has never been found.
Still, there are reasons to regard Huawei with suspicion. For example, it is unclear who owns the company. Huawei executives have said the firm is mostly owned by its employees.
But research published in May 2019 by Christopher Balding of New Kite Data Labs and Donald Clarke of George Washington University found that Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, owns 1 per cent of the shares. The remaining 99 per cent is owned by a union committee.
Who the members are and how they were selected is completely unclear. If this committee really belongs to a union, Huawei could in fact be considered a state-owned company, the researchers argue, because independent unions do not exist in China.
In a separate study published two months later, Balding and other researchers looked at 25,000 leaked resumes of Huawei employees.
The researchers found CVs of staff members who simultaneously worked for both the telecom giant and the Chinese military. Others could be linked to Chinese institutions involved in hacking, and some connected to China's Ministry of State Security.
Before founding Huawei, Ren Zhengfei also served in the Chinese military, between 1968 and 1982, as described in the recent book House of Huawei by Washington Post journalist Eva Dou.
Shortly after that study was released, Bloomberg revealed the existence of several research projects carried out by Huawei together with institutions of the Chinese military. The findings were swiftly denied by Huawei. The company also denied that its employees work for the Chinese military and security forces, as Balding stated in his research.
PR blitz in Brussels
As the geopolitical dispute ramped up in 2019, so did Huawei’s lobbying efforts.
Huawei forked out more than 3 million euros that year on its PR blitz in Brussels, the most it had spent in a single year, according to data from the EU’s transparency register compiled by LobbyFacts. The company’s yearly spending on European lobbying since 2012 is believed to make Huawei one of the tech industry’s biggest lobbyists in the EU capital.
With the financial firepower came the manpower. The 18 representatives that Huawei registered with the European Parliament in 2019 is its highest annual total to date.
None proved to be more important, or controversial, than Belgian-Italian Valerio Ottati.
The 41-year-old joined Huawei in June 2019 as its EU Public Affairs Director after spending a decade in the Parliament as an assistant for two Italian MEPs. He worked first with centre-right Crescenzio Rivellini, then with centre-left Nicola Caputo: both of whom were members of the Parliament’s group that focuses on Europe’s policy towards China.
He went on to play a key role in the company’s Brussels lobbying operation, and is suspected to be at the heart of the alleged corruption that is currently under investigation. Ottati was not immediately available to comment on the allegations.
With his contacts across political camps, Ottati could offer his new employer a platform in Brussels.
In October 2019 – eight months after Huawei’s Chinese New Year party – Ottati organised a public event in the Parliament.
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Liu, the company’s chief lobbyist in Europe, told a packed conference room that he wanted to “ease fears” about the company.
Attending the event were a number of EU lawmakers whose positions would frequently align with those of the company. These included Franc Bogovič, a centre-right Slovenian MEP who moderated a panel on cybersecurity.
Bogovič was no stranger to the company. In 2016, he visited Huawei’s headquarters in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, and posted photos and warm words about the visit on Facebook.
The message was well understood in the EU’s capitals: get Huawei off the grids
At the Parliament event, Bogovič was joined on the panel by Czech politician Jan Zahradil.
Zahradil was a member of the Parliament’s China delegation at the time. He would later face a formal investigation into whether he failed to properly disclose financial support from the Chinese mission to the EU for MEPs to travel to China.
And while Ottati was busy organising events, Huawei also invested heavily in memberships in trade groups and think tanks, including influential institutions such as Bruegel and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS).
With this, the tech giant could ensure that it was part of the conversation, not just the subject of criticism.
Huawei spent at least 1.7 million euros over the past decade on those memberships, which allowed it to host or participate in panels alongside EU officials.
The telecom industry was an important ally of Huawei in the company’s fight against its exclusion from the market. In June 2019, a leaked report by lobby group GSMA – which represents hundreds of operators across the globe – estimated that a ban on Chinese vendors would raise the cost of building up 5G networks by 55 billion euros.
A ban would also slow the roll-out of high-speed networks by 18 months, according to the report. However, industry experts dispute these figures. A report by Strand Consult – a Danish telecoms consultancy – suggests that most of the equipment in question would need to be replaced anyway, and that the true cost is closer to 3.5 billion euros.
EU turns the screw
In January 2020, some nine months after the US trade blacklist that shrank Huawei’s smartphone sales, the EU made an announcement that would threaten the future of the company’s 5G infrastructure business.
Addressing a room of journalists, European Commission Vice-President Margrethe Vestager and Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said that member states had agreed to take steps to exclude “high-risk” vendors from their 5G networks.
Vestager, a Danish politician in charge of digital and competition policy, stressed that this did not “target any specific country or company”.
But the message was well understood in the EU’s capitals: get Huawei off the grids.
A few months later, in July 2020, France made provisions to phase out the role of Chinese companies in its 5G networks – amounting to a de facto ban by 2028, Reuters reported.
In October, Sweden – home to Huawei’s rival Ericsson – entirely banned Huawei and other Chinese vendors from its mobile network expansion and said equipment they had already installed had to be removed by 2025.
And the UK, which officially left the EU two days after the announcement, soon followed – setting a 2027 deadline for Huawei’s kit to be removed from the 5G network.
In Brussels, politicians also weighed in on the controversy.
© Eline Schipperen
A letter signed by 41 members of the Parliament called on the Commission to exclude Huawei and its Chinese competitor ZTE entirely from 5G networks across Europe.
The letter – known in Brussels as the “Nokia letter”, after Huawei’s other European competitor, and dated October 2020 – also pushed to prohibit any EU funding for the use of technology from high-risk vendors from China.
The signatories include high-profile MEPs such as former Commissioner Andrus Ansip, German Green politician Sven Giegold, and former Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, who is now the EU’s Defence Commissioner.
But a small, vocal group stood in opposition.
Eight MEPs wrote a counter-letter, in which they warned of “technological racism”, arguing that excluding vendors based on where they came from was discriminatory.
The signatories included Cristian-Silviu Busoi, who at the time chaired the Parliament’s powerful committee on industry, research and energy. In an apparent twist, Giuseppe Ferrandino, an Italian MEP who had signed the so-called Nokia letter, also signed the counter-letter.
At a time when Huawei was on the defensive, this carried symbolic value; it signalled to the public that the company had the backing of at least some EU lawmakers.
Diplomatic debacle
Feeling the heat in Brussels and beyond, Huawei might have thought its fortunes were about to change when Rotating Chairman Ken Hu managed to set up a video meeting with Commissioner Breton to plead his company’s case in December 2020.
However, the success of obtaining a private call turned into a PR disaster after a breach of protocol, the Financial Times reported two years later.
After the meeting, a senior Huawei lobbyist rang Breton on his private mobile number, “screaming down the phone and celebrating”, according to a follow-up story by Politico.
That lobbyist was Ottati, former Huawei employees told Follow the Money.
That didn’t go down well with the Commission, with Breton having been “appalled” by the incident and Hu personally apologising to Breton for causing “distress”, Politico reported.
But the damage had been done.
Later, repeated requests by Huawei to arrange a video meeting with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen were politely rebuffed.
“Regretfully [..] the President is unable to provide a positive response to your request due to the heavy time constraints of her busy agenda during the coming months,” shows one reply, dated September 2021 and obtained by FTM through a freedom of information request.
The meeting with Breton wasn’t the only move by Huawei that backfired badly.
In the summer of 2020, the Belgian government – following Commission guidelines – mulled banning manufacturers that it considered high risk from core parts of its 5G network. Soon after, mobile operators Orange and Proximus decided to drop Huawei from their 5G network expansion plans.
Huawei’s European executives began an aggressive social media campaign to spread a counter-narrative arguing that Belgium’s shunning of Chinese vendors was due to “nepotism” and a “lack of accountability”, the Belgian magazine Knack reported.
A number of accounts supposedly belonging to telecoms experts and academics that backed Huawei’s position popped up on Twitter – but were later exposed as fake by Knack.
Huawei’s attempt to influence the public discourse in its favour turned into another PR mishap: following Knack’s reporting, Politico, the New York Times and other international outlets covered the story. This episode caused Belgian intelligence to ramp up its scrutiny of Huawei, according to sources.
“China can potentially even endanger our democracy,” then-Digital Minister Petra De Sutter told members of the Belgian parliament when asked about the incident.
But despite Huawei’s busted fake campaign, Belgium has not formally excluded Chinese suppliers from its entire 5G network, at least not yet.
Commission’s frustration
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 made life even harder for Huawei in Europe, according to one former employee, who said staff in the company’s Brussels lobbying office were asked to work more closely with the Chinese mission to the EU as a result.
In a meeting after the conflict started, a Commission official told the company that “China’s stance on the war in Ukraine has a negative impact on the overall EU-China relations”.
As the war raged on, the Commission worried that member states were ignoring its concerns over 5G. At a speech in Stockholm in June 2023, Commissioner Breton told politicians and industry leaders that only ten member states had restricted or excluded high-risk vendors.
“This is too slow, and it poses a major security risk and exposes the Union's collective security, since it creates a major dependency for the EU and serious vulnerabilities,” he said.
Breaking with the Commission's previous restraint, Breton named Huawei and ZTE as targets for exclusion. A week earlier, he had reportedly floated a Europe-wide ban on high-risk vendors at a meeting of the bloc’s telecom ministers, but the idea never got traction due a lack of political support from member states.
A thinly-veiled threat
To Breton’s ire, the reluctance to exclude Chinese vendors seemed strongest in one of the EU’s most powerful countries, and the home of Huawei’s European headquarters: Germany.
That was because industry players such as Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone heavily lobbied the German government, said Max Bank, a researcher with the German NGO LobbyControl who authored a study on the Chinese tech giant’s lobbying efforts.
They wanted to keep Huawei’s equipment in play over concerns they could lose market access in China, according to Bank. “Berlin is key in this [debate],” he said.
The Chinese company benefited from Deutsche Telekom’s close relationship with the German government, which is still a shareholder in the former state monopoly, Bank said.
Although it did not name Huawei directly, the government told Deutsche Telekom in October 2022 that it did not plan “a general exclusion of a manufacturer of network components from the development of the 5G infrastructure”, according to preparatory notes for a meeting.
Having been seen as a straggler in implementing the EU’s 5G network security measures, Germany announced last July that it would force telecom operators to exclude Chinese firms from its core mobile networks. However, the government said they had until 2029 to do so.
This will leave German networks dependent on Chinese hardware and software for years and “not improve security” for the foreseeable future, consultant John Strand – the founder of Strand Consult and a telecoms industry veteran – told Follow the Money.
In Brussels, Huawei attempted to leverage the same fears as in Germany – the potential loss of market access for European companies in China.
In December 2023, Huawei’s lobbyists warned staff of the Commission’s Vice-President Věra Jourová behind closed doors about “the possible risk to competition, the EU single market, and to digital deployment, if Huawei is excluded”.
In a thinly-veiled threat, Huawei’s lobbyists, whose names are redacted from the documents, touted “China’s openness to EU firms (Ericsson and Nokia) and their engagement with [the Chinese] government to keep it so.”
Scandal closes in on Huawei
As Huawei lurched between setbacks and scandals, its PR playbook drew official scrutiny.
In early 2023, Politico reported that Belgium's State Security Service (VSSE) was interviewing ex-Huawei lobbyists. The probe has reportedly investigated whether the company’s European operation had been used by the Chinese state to advance its interests.
The VSSE has declined to comment on its probe. In reply to the Politico story, Huawei denied the allegations. In 2022, the VSSE warned in an intelligence report that China was attempting to “influence decision-making processes” in Belgium using a range of state and non-state resources.
The raids in Brussels today took place just over a year after France's national financial prosecutor (PNF) stormed Huawei’s offices in Paris over allegations of “improper behaviour”.
Under French law, this charge can include offences such as corruption and influence peddling. Huawei denies wrongdoing and said in a statement in February 2024 that it “has always respected all French laws and regulations”.
© Eline Schipperen
In Brussels, investigators intensified their monitoring of Ottati and other suspects in the police’s corruption probe, tapping phones and installing bugs in residential buildings.
Yet, even as investigators tightened the knot, Ottati remained heavily involved in Huawei’s lobbying effort in Brussels. In late February 2024, he arranged a meeting between Liu’s successor as the company’s chief lobbyist, Tony Jin, and the Swedish ambassador Torbjörn Haak, according to official records from Sweden.
Was Huawei aware of the Belgian probe and the suspicions surrounding Ottati? If so, then why did it not immediately fire him? Suggestions about the complicity of the company in the alleged bribery of MEPs could push Huawei further out of Europe, dampening its prospects of being a global powerhouse.
While the Commission may well have the last laugh, Huawei's lobbying strategy seems to have served it well so far. Less than half of the EU’s 27 member states have banned Chinese vendors from their mobile network infrastructure.
Tellingly, the Commission’s new Vice-President for tech regulation, Henna Virkkunen, voiced her exasperation with the lack of action shortly before taking office in December.
“I'm not satisfied at all”, Virkkunen told MEPs.
“I think the member states haven't been taking this seriously enough.”
Siem Eikelenboom contributed to the reporting.
1 December, 2018 – Huawei founder’s daughter Meng Wanzhou is arrested in Canada on a U.S. warrant.
16 May, 2019 – The U.S. government places Huawei on its trade blacklist.
20 May, 2019 – Google restricts Huawei's access to key Android features.
7 June, 2019 - Valerio Ottati starts working for Huawei in Brussels after a decade spent as an assistant for MEPs.
29 January, 2020 – The Commission announces plans to exclude “high-risk” vendors from 5G networks.
14 October, 2020 – Dozens of MEPs sign the so-called “Nokia letter” urging the Commission to ban Huawei and its Chinese competitor ZTE from Europe’s 5G networks.
4 January, 2021 - Eight MEPs write a counter-letter warning of “technological racism” against Huawei.
24 February, 2022 – Geopolitical tensions rise further as Russia launches a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
9 December, 2022 – Qatargate: EU officials accused of corruption linked to Qatar, and Morocco.
13 March, 2025 – Belgian federal police search houses of several MEPs suspected of receiving bribes from Huawei, as part of a corruption probe.
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Authors
Alexander Fanta
Covers technology and tech policy-making in the EU, and likes to uncover lobbying with Freedom of Information requests.
Send a news tipSimon Van Dorpe
Expert on EU competition, industrial policy and the influence of large multinationals. Researches consultancies & corruption.
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