Huawei CFO acquitted of fraud charges

Four years after the arrest of the chief financial officer of the Chinese multinational Huawei, Meng Wanzhou, a federal judge in New York, dismissed the charges of financial fraud. There was something off about this. It was these very charges that led relations between the U.S. and China to become strained. So much so that Huawei was placed on a U.S. trade blacklist in 2019 for national security concerns and human rights violations. The sanctions restricted Huawei's access to critical U.S. technologies, and crippled the company's smartphone business. Now, what does the acquittal of this Huawei executive mean? Could this mean the end of an intense conflict between the two countries? Let's see. According to Reuters, on December 2nd, U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly in Brooklyn dismissed Meng's indictment with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled. A day earlier, U.S. Attorney Carolyn Pokorny filed their request to dismiss the charges against Meng, claiming there was no information that she had violated any terms of the agreement as of December 1st. The prosecutor wrote in the letter, It should be clarified that the accused is the daughter of the founder of Huawei, and was arrested in 2018 in Vancouver, Canada, by order of the U.S. The U.S. had accused her of defrauding and misinforming HSBC Bank about Huawei's dealings with Iran. At the time, the Chinese Communist Party reacted and took hostage two Canadians working in China, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. According to the Wall Street Journal report, both foreigners were charged with espionage and sent to jail, while Meng was out on bail at one of her mansions in Vancouver. And so it was that the U.S. and China engaged in a three-year battle of negotiations to According to the Epoch Times, hostage diplomacy is considered a tactic often used by the Chinese regime. The Canadians were later released after Meng reached a deferred prosecution agreement with U.S. prosecutors, and returned to China in September 2021. In that deal, Huawei's CFO admitted to misleading global institutions about the Chinese company's business dealings in Iran, and the government agreed to hold off prosecution until December 2022, and drop the case altogether if the defendant complies with the conditions specified in the agreement. However, Huawei remains a defendant in the case, which is pending in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York. A meeting with the parties has been scheduled for February 7th, but a trial date has not yet been set. The question is, is a particularly tense phase of U.S.-China relations coming to a close? What can we expect? Leave us your opinion below the video.