Having been interested in the progress of Huawei at least since the time of reference 1, I have idly wondered about this business and I share a few factlets.
Meng Wanzhou is an accountant by trade and the daughter by first marriage of the septuagenarian founder of Huawei. A man of considerable achievement, having built the present company, from scratch, in around thirty years. A stellar progression, perhaps in the same league as Google, Amazon and Facebook. And she hasn't done badly either, although her father denies that she is being groomed for succession.
She also owns seven regular passports. Plus a special Chinese government passport, usually issued to people of state importance. Obviously dodgy!
The moral charge is using a Huawei puppet, Skycom, to sell stuff to the Iranians around ten years ago, in contravention of (US and EU) sanctions. The formal charge is passing dodgy money through HSBC. Reuters was the snitch. Although, thinking with my fingers, is it any bad thing for the Iranians to have up to date communications technology? Might it not, in a roundabout way, help them get out of the mullah flavoured sink hole they have got themselves into? Which, in a roundabout way, we helped them get into in the first place.
Skycom appears to some sort of telecoms intermediary with very small Bing and Google footprints. Once again, obviously dodgy!
Presumably she is the most senior person in Huawei that the US Justice Department were able to get their paws on. What would our great leader have done had the extradition request arrived here, rather than in Canada? Where one legal angle is that the alleged offence has to be an offence in both the US and Canada - and it is not clear to me at least that we have an offence in Canada. Not their sanctions.
Presumably mainly a skirmish in the battle that the US is having with Huawei more generally. Should we trust them to build large chunks of our internet infrastructure - given that it seems likely that in years to come it will be quite possible to hold whole countries to ransom by getting inside said infrastructure?
Would that matter in our case, given that the Chinese might well own a large fraction of UK PLC by then, and therefore be unlikely to want to damage their own property?
What will our great leader do about this one? Nowhere to hide... Glad it's not my decision.
Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2012/08/sacks.html.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Wanzhou.
Reference 3: https://www.unitedagainstnucleariran.com/company/skycom-tech-co-ltd. A rather odd looking website. Who knows who or what is behind it.
Reference 4: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-huawei-skycom/exclusive-huawei-cfo-linked-to-firm-that-offered-hp-gear-to-iran-idUSBRE90U0CC20130131. A seven year old piece from Reuters, which includes a mention of registration in our very own British Virgin Islands. Hoist with our own petard, as they used to say.
Reference 5: https://www.hktdc.com/manufacturers-suppliers/Skycom-Telecommunications-Co-Ltd/en/1X04UY15/. A not very helpful listing for Skycom in what looks like a business directory.
PS: having guessed the file name of reference 1 wrong in the first instance, I discover that you right click on the post, view source, wade through a whole lot of html - to arrive at the file name.
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