A look at the 2019 US criminal case against Huawei, with an upcoming trial over racketeering charges, including sanctions evasion and corporate espionage
Five years after finance chief Meng Wanzhou's release from detention in Canada, the company itself is going on trial
Context & Ripple Effects
The case began with the 2019 indictment of Huawei, Meng Wanzhou and affiliated firms, then expanded in 2020 with racketeering and IP-theft allegations. A 2025 ruling requiring Huawei to face the charges moved the long-running prosecution from pleading-stage dispute toward trial.
Meng’s individual case ended with a 2022 dismissal, while the corporate prosecution continued. That separation makes the proceedings a focused test of the allegations against Huawei rather than a continuation of the case against its former finance chief.
First-order effects
- Huawei must defend allegations of racketeering, sanctions evasion and corporate espionage in a U.S. criminal trial; the DOJ must prove a case assembled across years of indictments.
- The trial puts the government’s 2020 expanded racketeering and IP-theft case under adversarial scrutiny after the court declined to dismiss it.
Second-order effects
- The continued corporate case preserves legal exposure for Huawei independent of Meng’s resolved individual prosecution, sharpening the distinction between executive liability and alleged company conduct.
- Evidence and rulings at trial will shape how the DOJ can frame sanctions-related bank-fraud and trade-secret allegations together in a racketeering case against a multinational technology company.
Third-order effects
- If the prosecution establishes its theory, it would strengthen the use of broad criminal statutes to pursue alleged conduct spanning technology, financial institutions and sanctions compliance.
- The case illustrates how corporate criminal enforcement can outlast the resolution of a high-profile executive case, leaving company-level accountability on a separate timetable.
The trend: Cross-border technology disputes are increasingly being pursued through durable corporate criminal cases that combine sanctions, financial and intellectual-property allegations.