NEW YORK – As María Corina Machado returned to Venezuela on Sunday, a new American indictment laid out how prosecutors say Nicolás Maduro subverted democracy: torture, bribery and coercion at home, and a transnational narcoterrorism conspiracy that bound Mexican cartels and Colombian guerrillas to Venezuela’s corrupted military, courts and police.

According to the superseding indictment, political opponents were tortured, judges were promised monthly bonuses, relatives were brutalized when a judge resisted orders to exclude opposition candidates, and soldiers were deployed undercover alongside armed civilian groups to conceal the government’s responsibility for violence.

The indictment directly addresses the election that blocked Machado’s movement from office.

Prosecutors describe Maduro declaring victory after a “sham” presidential contest in July 2024, followed by further atrocities during the ensuing political unrest. Machado had been barred from running and backed Edmundo González Urrutia, whom voting records examined by the Carter Center showed had overwhelmingly defeated Maduro.

Unsealed in Manhattan federal court on October 8, the indictment alleges that Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, maintained a system in which narco enrichment and political repression reinforced each other.

Officials profited from protected cocaine shipments and government contracts. Those threatening the arrangement faced imprisonment, dispossession or torture. Both defendants have pleaded not guilty.

The alleged system extended beyond Venezuela: cocaine moved through Caribbean and Central American transshipment points toward the United States, weapons were supplied to Colombian guerrillas, and a military officer targeted by Maduro was allegedly taken across the Colombian border to be held by Venezuelan counterintelligence personnel and guerrilla fighters.

One allegation also extends beyond Maduro’s removal.

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By Brenda Shaffer

This week the UK Energy Secretary announced that the British government will remove its block on operations of the Jackdaw natural gas field, and that the gas produced there will rea…

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By Elbert King Paul, CPA CA

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BROOKLYN, New York — Three Iranian witnesses in Huawei’s criminal trial possessed knowledge so distinctive and closely held that their testimony alone could identify them and expose them to reprisals, according to a newly filed judicial opinion obtained by The Bureau.

Prosecutors described inside access to Huawei and Skycom operations in Iran—including projects that few others knew about—and said the witnesses would expose Tehran’s efforts to suppress dissent.

Prosecutors also warned of a separate danger to witnesses: retaliation by the Chinese government, which they described as having close ties to Huawei, for cooperating with American authorities.

U.S. District Judge Ann M. Donnelly agreed that the witnesses could be identified from what they knew and found their safety concerns sufficient to justify closing the courtroom during their testimony.

“Each of the witnesses has expressed . . . significant fear of testifying due to the risk of reprisals from the Iranian government, given the Iranian government’s well-documented history of retaliation against those who try to undermine the Iranian regime, both in Iran and abroad,” prosecutors told the court, according to the opinion.

All three are Iranian nationals with close family in Iran.

The heavily redacted opinion, signed October 1 and filed publicly October 21, explains Donnelly’s September 18 decision to close the courtroom for their testimony. It describes the evidence prosecutors expected them to offer and why concealing their names would not adequately protect them.

According to the government’s submission quoted in the opinion, their testimony would “disparage the Iranian government and illuminate and publicize its efforts to suppress dissent in Iran.”

The broader prosecution alleges that Huawei secretly controlled Skycom, a Hong Kong company through which it supplied telecommunications infrastructure and services in Iran while misleading international banks about the relationship. The indictment alleges that Huawei’s Iranian business included surveillance technology used to “monitor, identify and detain protestors” during anti-government demonstrations in Tehran in 2009.

As The Bureau previously reported, Huawei’s Iranian operations have also figured in a contested effort by prosecutors to introduce bank compliance records citing alleged Chinese military and intelligence connections. The material included concerns raised by American lawmakers about reported ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Huawei challenged that material as unreliable and inflammatory.

The newly filed opinion focuses on people with knowledge of the operations themselves.

One witness was expected to describe work for Skycom and Huawei in Iran. Another passage describes anticipated testimony about multiple Skycom projects and quotes prosecutors saying that “few people, if any, were aware of these projects,” had the witness’s level of access or possessed the same knowledge.

Names, portions of the witnesses’ backgrounds and descriptions of particular work are blacked out. The public opinion does not identify the specific projects.

But Donnelly’s conclusion about the identifying power of their evidence is explicit.

“The witnesses’ proffered testimony is sufficiently unique such that each of the witnesses could be identified based solely on their testimony,” she wrote.

Before trial, Donnelly had already granted the government’s request to let 11 witnesses testify under aliases or initials. For these three witnesses, prosecutors argued, the danger extended beyond recognition of their faces or names: the substance of their evidence could reveal who they were.

Donnelly accepted the safety justification, citing Iran’s targeting of critics abroad.

“Indeed, news reports substantiate the government’s claims that the Iranian government has targeted people in the United States — including in New York City — who have publicly criticized the regime,” she wrote.

She cited a May Justice Department announcement titled “Staten Island Man Sentenced for Murder-for-Hire Plot and Stalking a Journalist and Prominent Critic of the Iranian Government.” Iran, she added, “has also plotted to assassinate critics in” locations redacted from the public version.

In a separate footnote, the opinion records the government’s warning that “there is also a serious risk the PRC government — which has close ties to Huawei — may retaliate against” the three witnesses “as punishment for cooperating with the U.S. government against PRC interests.”

Donnelly recorded that warning without making a separate finding on possible Chinese retaliation. Her explanation for the closure focused on Iranian reprisals and the witnesses’ vulnerability to identification.

The prosecution’s warning about possible Chinese retaliation comes against a separate intelligence record concerning Beijing’s efforts to prevent Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou from facing American proceedings.

As The Bureau has reported, a classified June 2019 Canadian Security Intelligence Service assessment concluded that Beijing’s determination to prevent Meng’s extradition from Canada was driven partly by concern that she could cooperate with U.S. authorities and disclose privileged information.

The assessment described Ministry of State Security units receiving direction “from high levels” and competing to make the “largest possible impact.” According to CSIS, Beijing’s pressure campaign combined trade coercion, efforts to influence politically connected Canadian business leaders, clandestine interference surrounding the 2019 federal election and leverage through the detention of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.

Meng, whose admissions concerned Huawei’s control of Skycom and its business in Iran, never entered American custody. In September 2021, she reached a deferred prosecution agreement, the United States withdrew its extradition request, and she returned to China. Beijing released Kovrig and Spavor within hours.

Meng’s evidence nevertheless reached the Brooklyn jury.

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OTTAWA — The money was scammed from Canadian victims. The Romanian theft-gang operative sent to collect it, an Ontario fraud investigator said Tuesday, flew from Paris to Montreal and then crossed into the United States on a jet ski at Akwesasne, the Mohawk territory that straddles the borders of Ontario, Quebec and New York.

“Literally it was a two minute jet ski ride that this guy hopped on with a human trafficker,” said Detective Sergeant John Armit of the Ontario Provincial Police.

Armit described the transnational case at an Ottawa seminar on Chinese money laundering and scam networks targeting North America and operating across Asia, hosted by Harry Tseng, Taiwan’s representative to Canada. The Ontario investigation was a joint effort with American federal national security agents, and Armit said more details will surface in November.

From the border, Armit said, the Romanian national drove all the way to Los Angeles, where he made multiple withdrawals of the victims’ money. He was part of what Armit described as a syndicated organized crime group “that was laundering money through a deli in LA back to Romania.”

The case worked, he said, because of speed. “We looked at the wire in live time and the Bank of America had an STR,” he said, referring to a suspicious transaction report the bank had filed. “So it’s that rapid pace that we have to have and we have to cut the bureaucracy in Canada.”

The territory Armit described has figured repeatedly in The Bureau’s reporting. More than 70 gangs operate across these Mohawk territories, including networks directed by Chinese Triads and Mexican cartels, where contraband tobacco operations intersect with fentanyl trafficking and illegal firearms networks.

American court records have linked Akwesasne to large-scale narcotics-smuggling organizations moving drugs between Quebec, Ontario and New York. On July 30, American authorities arrested three Akwesasne residents in another alleged international narcotics-smuggling operation, the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York announced in August. Testifying before Congress in May, FBI Director Kash Patel said drug traffickers were moving into the United States “on tribal lands.”

Armit said this geography has opened a gateway for bad actors moving contraband, firearms and human-trafficking victims across the border at Cornwall.

Armit did not say whether his cases connect to the Chinese money-laundering networks that Taiwanese investigators described at the same event, which they say laundered about $343 million in US currency through Taiwan for Cambodia’s Prince Group.

But the methods he described ran along parallel lines: romance and investment frauds aimed at North American victims, corrupted insiders at financial institutions, and laundering routes built to move money across borders faster than police can follow.

In the last six months, Armit said, 10 officers he has been training as cyber investigators wrote 132 production orders, made five arrests and closed 28 files, with 18 more arrests “on deck” and 43 files still open.

A second case involving Nigeria’s “Black Axe” transnational mafia illustrated the reach of a single fraudster’s network. A woman living in Kemptville, about 45 minutes outside Ottawa, was 72 when a man began messaging her on Facebook, professing his love. She believed he was a U.S. Army general stationed in Afghanistan. By the time the deception was over, she had lost $150,000 of her life savings.

After she went to police, investigators found she was still in contact with the fraudster. They took over her identity online and told him to come and collect more money.

He drove in from Toronto, and officers arrested him with support from the force’s aircraft and Emergency Response Team.

Armit spent four months going through the man’s phone. “He had people inside financial institutions,” he said.

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OTTAWA — For nearly six years, analysts inside Taiwan’s financial intelligence unit followed the Prince Group’s money. The Cambodia-based conglomerate, United States prosecutors allege, ran slave-lab…

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OTTAWA — The only publicly listed filing in Canada’s new foreign-influence registry connected to a Chinese principal has reappeared after weeks offline—but in significantly revised form, with its payment disclosure amount removed and additional information linking editor Aidan Jonah to several of the outlet’s social-media channels.

Meanwhile, only three registrations are publicly displayed after a troubled launch.

During recent parliamentary testimony, Conservative MP Michael Cooper cited a Public Safety Canada estimate that the registry’s information-technology system would cost $29.41 million, called the registry “in shambles” and demanded that Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree appear before a parliamentary committee to explain its failures.

The restored filing identifies The Canada Files Media as the registrant and CGTN Français as its foreign principal. It says the Ontario-based media company entered an arrangement to publish sponsored content intended “to have more Canadians be supportive of China’s management of its domestic political affairs.”

The restored filing differs from the official Canada.ca record preserved by The Bureau before it disappeared on September 15.

The archived version reported that The Canada Files received 4,000 Chinese yuan—approximately $823—for an arrangement with CGTN Français running from August 5 to August 13.

The restored filing states only that compensation was provided and classifies the payment as an “honorarium.”

The restored record identifies The Canada Files’ X and YouTube accounts, its website and Substack newsletter. It also names “Aidan Jonah” as the username associated with a Telegram channel and lists “Aidan Jonah (personal profile)” as a Facebook account.

Blacklock’s Reporter, a parliamentary news service, also reported on the registration on October 13 under the headline “China Backed Anti-Israel Site.”

The Canada Files describes itself as a “proudly socialist, anti-imperialist news organization” established to investigate Canadian foreign policy and the military-industrial complex.

Its publication history includes repeated criticism of Israel and organizations that combat antisemitism.

The outlet has also defended Laith Marouf, formerly a senior consultant to the Community Media Advocacy Centre, which received federal anti-racism funding before Canadian Heritage suspended the project over statements the department described as antisemitic and racist.

In a 2022 article headlined “Ottawa cancels funding for anti-racist conferences under pressure from Zionist lobby,” The Canada Files said Marouf had used “strong and emotional language” against Israel’s occupation of Palestine. It argued that accusations of antisemitism distorted his anti-Zionist statements and reported that the cancellation followed pressure from pro-Israel organizations.

Canadian Heritage’s own records offered a different assessment. An official departmental briefing note said Marouf’s “antisemitic statements and other racial slurs” were unacceptable.

The department had approved $133,822 for the organization’s project, titled “Building an Anti-Racism Strategy for Canadian Broadcasting.”

“Mr. Marouf and the Community Media Advisory Centre should never have been approved for funding through the Anti-Racism Action Program,” Canadian Heritage’s subsequent briefing note says. “Their funding has been cut and their project suspended.”

The Canada Files later disclosed that Jonah and Marouf co-hosted a regular program titled “Canada and Palestine: The War on Zionism.”

An August 2024 promotion for its twelfth episode advertised discussion of “Palestinian resistance,” Yahya Sinwar’s appointment as Hamas political bureau chief and the targeting of pro-Palestine campus encampment protests.

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By Piero A. Tozzi and Dean Baxendale

Xi Jinping offers the world a seductive promise: a “community with a shared future for mankind.” Its intellectual ancestry is rooted in tianxia…

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By Mehmet Tohti

OTTAWA — Canada’s current trade strategy of expansion and diversification is actively encouraging more Canadian companies to enter the Chinese market. However, once these businesses re…

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BROOKLYN, New York — The agents had been trying all day to get Ren Zhengfei alone. Every time they approached the founder of Huawei, he was surrounded by a larger group of people.

So, in the early hou…

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LOS ANGELES — A California realtor accused of spying on the family of Taiwan’s leader for Beijing also coordinated underground banking transfers from China into the United States, according to an FBI declaration obtained by The Bureau. Her alleged surveillance partner’s business, meanwhile, leads to a house identified in a separate federal investigation as a cash drop for a Chinese laundering organization working with the Sinaloa Cartel.

A CBS News investigation has traced a further connection through that partner’s business circle to an alleged enforcer for Cambodia’s Prince Group — the criminal enterprise whose dealings with Chinese security officials The Bureau examined in June.

Taken together, the records bring a familiar pattern into sharper focus.

The Bureau’s investigations into the Vancouver Model have followed the overlap between underground finance, property wealth, organized crime and Chinese state interests. In the California case, the FBI alleges that one woman was involved in both clandestine surveillance for Chinese officials and unlicensed international money transfers. Separate reporting places her associate’s commercial relationships within reach of two major transnational crime investigations.

Wanying “Heather” Zhang, 34, of Irvine, was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on October 4 as she prepared to board a one-way flight to Shanghai. A criminal complaint filed the day before charges her with acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. It alleges that in September 2025 she and a companion, identified only as Individual 1, staked out the Seattle-area home of the son of Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, at the direction of two officials the FBI describes as working for the Chinese government.

In a sworn declaration filed Tuesday, FBI Special Agent Kevin Holt wrote that Zhang’s WhatsApp and iMessage texts show she “appears to coordinate the unlicensed transfer of money from the People’s Republic of China to the United States.”

The profits, he wrote, “total in the hundreds of thousands of dollars” and appear to have been deposited into Chinese bank accounts. Zhang sent at least $190,000 to Chinese bank accounts as part of the scheme in 2024 and 2025, according to the declaration, and the scheme has continued since.

Holt said he believes Zhang has significant financial resources available to her in China.

“I also came to this conclusion based upon defendant’s conversations about her investment in a nightclub in Shanghai,” he wrote.

Holt also wrote that Zhang was “still engaged in a romantic relationship with Individual 1.”

Zhang is married to another man, a fellow real estate agent, and has young children, according to the New York Post. At her detention hearing, her lawyers cited those family ties in Irvine in arguing that she was not a flight risk.

Agents searching Zhang’s home found paperwork showing she graduated first in her class from the University of International Relations in Beijing. The complaint describes the university as closely affiliated with China’s Ministry of State Security, which it says “recruits heavily” there.

The Bureau reported last week that the surveillance case also ran through Southern California real estate. Nicholas Eftimiades, a former American intelligence official whose 34-year government career included the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, found that the Seattle rental-car paperwork listed Individual 1’s address on Walnut Avenue in Arcadia.

The FBI affidavit says Individual 1 sold a house at that address on or about September 11, 2025. Searching property records, Eftimiades found only one sale on the street in that period: a residence of about $4 million, with Zhang as the listing agent.

A man named Fatai Miao may be linked to that property, Eftimiades reported.

CBS confirmed Individual 1 as Fatai Miao, 54, a construction entrepreneur. According to CBS, Miao is the registered agent of Yuanjin Development & Construction LLC, registered at a $4.5 million house on Interstellar Street in Irvine.

In a 2023 criminal complaint reviewed by CBS, prosecutors alleged that house was a stash house for a Chinese money laundering organization working with the Sinaloa Cartel. A DEA task force officer described watching a member of the group deliver a weighted tote bag to the property in March 2023. He believed it contained illicit cash.

The Justice Department accused the group of running an unlicensed currency exchange that laundered millions for the cartel. A 2024 indictment charged 24 members. Miao was not named or charged in that case and has not been charged with any crime.

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CBS followed the corporate trail further.

Miao’s partner in Yuanjin Development, Cheng Zhang, co-manages a separate California company with a firm controlled by Chen Sokly. Reporters have identified Sokly as the unnamed Co-Conspirator-2 in the New York indictment against Prince Group chairman Chen Zhi.

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By Brenda Shaffer

Responding to the current global energy crisis, many Western leaders have declared that the way to remove geopolitical threats to energy security is to transition from fossil fuels t…

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By Garry Clement

OTTAWA — Canada’s September 2026 evaluation by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) should serve as a defining moment for the country’s financial sector.

The report recognizes substantial improvements in Canada’s anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing framework. Financial intelligence has become more sophisticated, inter-agency cooperation has improved, and important advances have been made in beneficial ownership transparency.

But are we becoming better at regulating financial institutions than we are at prosecuting the criminals exploiting them?

As I will unpack throughout this piece, the central test is whether Canada can translate its growing financial intelligence capabilities into meaningful enforcement—dismantling professional money laundering networks, prosecuting their facilitators and stripping criminal enterprises of the wealth that sustains their operations.

The answer may depend, in part, on resolving thorny questions surrounding Canada’s legal framework and the role of legal professionals in financial transactions.

After more than five decades investigating organized crime and financial wrongdoing, including serving as the RCMP’s National Director of Proceeds of Crime and subsequently working in senior banking compliance roles, I believe this question goes to the heart of Canada’s financial crime problem.

The FATF findings reveal a system making measurable progress while continuing to struggle with professional money laundering, beneficial ownership transparency, complex prosecutions and recovering criminal proceeds.

For Canada’s banks, credit unions, money services businesses, virtual asset service providers and other reporting entities, compliance expectations are rising. Regulatory supervision is becoming more targeted. Technology and data analytics are increasingly important. And boards of directors will face growing pressure to demonstrate that their financial crime programs are effective in practice, not simply documented on paper.

On October 9, 2026, FINTRAC’s Deputy Director of Supervision and Chief Compliance Officer, Tina Matos, delivered a significant address to the Canadian ACAMS community. She made clear that FINTRAC intends to become a more sophisticated, technologically capable and risk-focused supervisor.

According to the address, the Centre’s funded supervisory envelope is increasing from approximately $60 million in 2025–26 to $85 million in the current fiscal year.

FINTRAC intends to use its expanded resources to deepen supervision across financial institutions, virtual currencies and online gaming while supporting oversight of newer sectors, including mortgage lending, leasing, financing and factoring. Its transformation also includes modernized technology, a proposed universal enrolment program and an expanded administrative monetary penalty framework.

It will no longer be sufficient to produce a risk assessment, maintain an extensive compliance manual and demonstrate that transactions have been screened. Regulators increasingly expect a clear and defensible connection between an institution’s risk exposure, the controls it has implemented, how those controls operate and the results they achieve.

Financial institutions should anticipate deeper, more focused examinations where identified risks justify greater scrutiny. Significant or repeated non-compliance may attract stronger enforcement responses as FINTRAC’s enhanced framework is implemented.

Yet FINTRAC has also emphasized that supervision should be fair and proportionate. Institutions with lower risk profiles should not automatically face the same supervisory intensity as organizations operating in materially higher-risk environments.

That distinction is especially important to smaller banks, credit unions and specialized financial institutions, many of which already bear substantial compliance costs. Risk-based supervision cannot simply mean more regulation. It must mean better-targeted regulation.

The FATF evaluation also provides a practical roadmap for financial institutions.

First, institutions must revisit how they assess risk.

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OTTAWA — As a cross-party delegation of Canadian members of Parliament traveled to Taiwan this week, a coalition of Chinese Canadian “reunification” associations demanded that the federal government “restrain its members of parliament from inappropriate behavior related to Taiwan.”

The statement was published on October 13 by CC.News, a Toronto Chinese-language news site. It is signed by the Canadian Chinese Alliance for the Promotion of China’s Reunification and affiliated committees in the Greater Toronto Area, Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary.

Beneath the article, in its advertising section, CC.News runs its own promotional panel showing former prime minister Justin Trudeau, a former Chinese consul general in Toronto, and a crowd at a rally in Markham, Ont., beneath the flag of the People’s Republic of China.

The same section carries a campaign poster for Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, who is seeking re-election on October 26, and another for her challenger, Brad Bradford.

A related-articles panel links to a 2019 CC.News story reporting that Wei Chengyi of the Confederation of Toronto Chinese Canadian Organizations had been received by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The October 13 statement names Liberal MP Judy Sgro, chair of the Canada-Taiwan parliamentary friendship group, Conservative MP Eric Duncan and New Democratic MP Jenny Kwan among those it says departed for Taiwan.

The statement declares that “the Taiwan Strait is under Chinese jurisdiction,” calls Canadian naval transits “a provocation against China’s sovereignty,” and warns that “‘Taiwan independence’ means war.” It tells MPs to “immediately cease all official exchanges with Taiwan” and closes with a pledge that the signatories “will continue to monitor developments.”

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BROOKLYN, New York — Heather Campbell was walking through a quiet sixth-floor hallway at Huawei’s Texas offices when the company’s in-house lawyer approached from the opposite direction. They had arranged to meet near the training room, where few colleagues were likely to pass.

Charles de Chateauvieux handed her an envelope. Neither said anything. The envelope changed hands, and they kept walking.

Campbell headed straight for the stairwell. She descended six flights to the parking lot, went to her car and prepared to open the envelope in private.

The scene could have come from a spy film. Campbell recalled it under oath Tuesday in Huawei’s federal racketeering trial in Brooklyn.

It was July 2013. Huawei was still building its consumer brand, but the Chinese company already rivaled Sweden’s Ericsson as the world’s largest telecommunications-equipment supplier.

In court this week, Campbell—a former Marine trained as a Mandarin Chinese linguist, then working as a corporate trainer for Huawei’s American subsidiary—recalled that de Chateauvieux had told her, with a serious look, about a document sent from Huawei’s headquarters in China.

She told jurors that “he was concerned that it was—it was basically asking our employees to steal. It was that. Asking our employees to steal company information from our competitors, and he was concerned about it. He knew that it was not right, and that’s what I recall.”

And so she asked to see the policy herself.

Her testimony goes to a central question in the case: whether alleged technology theft reflected an organized corporate practice.

Prosecutors accuse Huawei and its subsidiaries of conspiring to steal trade secrets and committing financial crimes involving sanctioned business in Iran and elsewhere. The trial opened with testimony alleging that Huawei supplied surveillance equipment used by Iran’s security forces against protesters following the country’s disputed 2009 presidential election. Huawei, which has pleaded not guilty, denies the allegations and argues that individual employees’ misconduct does not establish a criminal enterprise.

Jurors have also heard the agreed statement of facts signed by Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, read into the record October 7 by former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Leigh Ann Sweeney, who worked on the investigation.

Meng is not appearing in the courtroom to explain those admissions or face cross-examination.

As The Bureau has reported separately, a classified Canadian Security Intelligence Service assessment described an extraordinary pressure campaign by China’s Ministry of State Security to prevent Meng’s extradition from Canada. It included interference in the 2019 election, with support calibrated across Canada’s three major political parties. CSIS assessed that Beijing’s concerns included the possibility that Meng could cooperate with American authorities during a criminal trial and disclose privileged information.

The assessment also cited uncorroborated, single-source intelligence that Beijing might consider Meng’s exfiltration or assassination if it became “the only alternative to significant national harm.”

In Brooklyn this week, Campbell testified that the headquarters communication arrived against the backdrop of another troubling episode.

She already knew about the May 2013 incident involving Huawei at T-Mobile’s laboratory in Bellevue, Washington—events previously examined in the trial.

“I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to see it for myself. I needed to see it for myself,” she testified about the headquarters document. “Especially because I had awareness of other things that had happened.”

Asked whether that included the T-Mobile incident, she said yes.

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BROOKLYN, New York — Huawei’s American management warned employees they could be fired for collecting competitors’ confidential information after mainland China headquarters circulated a policy offering cash rewards for competitive intelligence, including product roadmaps, pricing and organizational information, according to Justice Department exhibits obtained by The Bureau.

The July 2013 documents, marked as government exhibits 16335 and 16336 in Huawei’s Brooklyn criminal trial, capture both the scale and reward structure of what prosecutors allege was a program to obtain competitors’ secrets, and the American operation’s response.

The policy tied payments to the confidentiality and importance of information, established a review process and directed staff to encrypt higher-tier submissions. Submissions were to be reviewed weekly and rewards paid monthly.

The English text says: “No punishment: everyone is encouraged to provide valuable competition info; no punishment.”

Two days later, an email from Jennifer Ponder, signed by Huawei Device USA’s management team, warned American employees against participating in the collection of competitors’ confidential material.

Read together, the documents provide a detailed view of evidence central to the government’s allegation that Huawei’s pursuit of competitors’ secrets extended beyond isolated employees. The policy describes an organized departmental system involving regional managers, headquarters reviewers, designated submission channels and recurring rewards.

Whether Huawei’s information-gathering system amounted to an organized theft program is a question the jury will have to consider.

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WASHINGTON — For years, as money bearing the hallmarks of Chinese laundering networks moved through its accounts, Bank of America looked past warnings from its own compliance staff, the U.S. Treasury…

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BROOKLYN, New York — The admissions Meng Wanzhou signed before returning to China have now been read to the jury deciding Huawei’s criminal case in Brooklyn, as courtroom closures and disputes over redacted evidence complicate public scrutiny of the proceedings.

On October 7, former FBI agent Leigh Ann Sweeney read Meng’s agreed statement of facts into the trial record. Sweeney worked on the investigation in 2017.

The development brings jurors the written admissions of Huawei’s chief financial officer, whose arrest in Vancouver triggered a diplomatic crisis involving Canada, China and the United States.

Meng herself is not appearing to explain those statements or face cross-examination. In June, U.S. District Judge Ann M. Donnelly ruled the statement admissible against Huawei and found it unnecessary for the company to question Meng at trial.

Meng’s absence carries a distinct Canadian history. As The Bureau reported when the trial opened, a classified June 2019 Canadian Security Intelligence Service assessment said Beijing feared she might cooperate with American authorities and disclose privileged information if extradited.

That intelligence assessment described a coordinated campaign to secure her return, including pressure focused on Canadian business leaders with access to senior Canadian elected officials, and election interference in the 2019 federal contest.

The intelligence reported by The Bureau is completely separate from the evidence now being tested in Brooklyn, but it provides another lens on the case, one that will not be heard by the New York jury.

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OTTAWA — The Bureau has never endorsed a political candidate. We do so now because Markham’s regional council race poses a question few Canadian voters have been equipped by their institutions to ans…

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