by JEFF J. BROWN
December 1, 2020 is the second anniversary of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou’s arrest—or kidnapping, depending on your point of view—in Vancouver, Canada.
If you work for the U.S.’s Departments of Justice, Treasury and State, with the CIA/NSA cheering from the galleries, it is just a simple extradition request to “carry out the law.”
If, however, you are company executive Frédéric Pierucci, Meng was kidnapped by the U.S., just as he was in 2013, whereupon he was imprisoned for two years on similar—he would say trumped-up—charges. His seizure was used to extort France’s flagship Alstom Corporation to pay $772 million in fines (ransom according to Pierucci) and sell off its most valuable portfolios to General Electric (GE), its U.S. competitor—all to gain his release. Pierucci survived his maximum-security incarceration and wrote a book about it, The American Trap: My battle to expose America’s secret economic war against the rest of the world.
The booty collected by the U.S. Treasury Department was the largest fine ever assessed, and enabled GE to seize key assets from and weaken one of its biggest global competitors. In Meng’s case, former assistant U.S. attorney in New York, Nick Akerman, who was a Watergate prosecutor, and Joseph Campbell, director of Navigant Consulting and an FBI agent, believe the U.S.’s goal is to get her to sing about Huawei’s internal operations and to name names—in other words, extort information out of her.
Pierucci and Meng are two headline catchers, but they are not alone. Eight foreign executives had already been arrested by 2007, using the U.S.’s sweeping antitrust laws. There are now many others, including executives from Abraaj Group, Martinair Cargo, and Parker ITR Srl.
Largely ignored by the mainstream media, there is also Wang Weijing, former Chinese diplomat turned Huawei marketing executive, who was arrested in Poland last year for espionage. Also not reported much is that, inside the United States, Chinese scientists and academics continue to be arrested or mysteriously die with many more in the arrest pipeline, like Hao Zhang last month.
Whether the target is political-economic or a real crook, anti-trust lawsuits involve building legal cases which are hard work, expensive and must eventually be made a part of the public record, making them more accountable.
While an integral part of U.S. “diplomacy” going back to the Cold War, the Trump administration, since 2017, has increasingly been using a second form of “enforcement”—legal or of the loan shark variety—financial sanctions and economic/trade embargoes against targeted countries, their companies and executives. This includes purported “allies” too, like France.
For example, a component from your company was used in parts sold to the targeted state/business, your company owns shares in another company in a similar trade transaction, or they paid/were paid via SWIFT bank transfer (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), which the U.S. effectively controls via the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
U.S. sanctions have quickly become imperial fractal designs, which metastasize and multiply themselves across global commerce and trade. Who needs expensive, accountable anti-trust lawsuits? It is easy to declare sanctions and, often, such extortion is all that is needed to get the desired effect. There are thousands of countries, businesses and persons listed on the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions webpages.
Covert Action for more