While prosecutors in Brussels did not name those charged, media reports have identified some members of parliament – known as MEPs – and their staff.
The payments reported, however, appeared relatively modest. One report said more than €45,000 ($81,000) was transferred to a lobbyist and this was used to pay €6,700 to a member of parliament and about €16,000 to aides.
Transparency International EU director Nick Aiossa said the charges demonstrated the lack of action in the parliament to stop corruption.
“The allegations that have been reported upon certainly point to a potential complex corruption scheme involving MEPs, their staff, Huawei and other legal entities,” he told this masthead.
In a setback for prosecutors, Italian MEP Giusi Princi went public this month about claims by prosecutors that she attended a dinner with Huawei in Brussels in June last year. She was not an MEP at that time and was in her home region of Calabria on the date of the dinner, attending an event with her daughter.
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“To this day I cannot understand how they could have made such a blatant mistake,” Princi told Agence France-Presse.
That mistake raised questions about whether Belgian prosecutors had their facts right – or whether the case should be investigated instead by stronger EU authorities.
Huawei has insisted in statements over several months that it had a “zero-tolerance policy toward corruption or other wrongdoing” and was complying with the law.
Several of the politicians who put their names to the 2021 letter have told the media they received no payments from the company.
Xi Jinping will host von der Leyen in Beijing on Thursday to mark 50 years of diplomatic recognition – the EU’s predecessor recognised mainland China in 1975, 2½ years after Australia did the same – but against the backdrop of rising tensions.
Von der Leyen has warned against China using its vast production capacity to flood markets and ruin competitors, and says it denies fair access to its market for EU companies.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.Credit: AP
“China is running the largest trade surplus in the history of humankind. Its trade surplus with our Union has surpassed €300 billion last year. And this is while it is getting harder and harder for European companies to do business in China,” she told legislators on July 9.
The major dispute between the two sides, however, is Ukraine, because of China’s economic support for Russia and the supply of Chinese technologies that find their way into Russian weapons.
“China’s unyielding support for Russia is creating heightened instability and insecurity here in Europe,” von der Leyen said.
“We can say that China is de facto enabling Russia’s war economy. We cannot accept this.”
The lobbying concerns in Brussels are not only about Chinese influence but the broader question of ethics in parliament after an earlier uproar over payments from Qatar.
Dubbed Qatargate and seen as the biggest scandal of its kind in decades, the affair began with allegations the Gulf state paid members of parliament to curry favour in Brussels. While some MEPs have been charged, the case has not been decided in court.
Corporate Europe Observatory, a non-profit campaign group, has named Huawei as one of the top tech lobbyists in Brussels, with a budget of more than €2 million and 11 full-time lobbyists, according to its own declarations.
“We already have a transparency register at the EU level that repressive regime lobbyists easily bypass because it is weak, voluntary, and poorly enforced,” it said, naming China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Aiossa, from Transparency International, said the European Union had made some progress on transparency, for instance by disclosing meetings between lobbyists and politicians, but was failing on ethics.
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“The Huawei case is crucially important because it demonstrates that the European Parliament needs to have much stronger and robust integrity and anti-corruption frameworks in place to prevent these scandals,” he said. “There was a moment in the wake of Qatargate when they could have been brave and brought forward ambitious reforms. They didn’t do it, which has led to the current Huawei scandal.”
MEPs are allowed to have side jobs outside parliament that allow them to receive payments from companies with a stake in laws passed. While the parliament passed resolutions about tightening the rules, these were non-binding. Aiossa said there were few sanctions when rules were broken because the parliament was self-policing.
