Brussels’ latest high-level corruption scandal about influence-peddling on behalf of the Chinese tech giant Huawei is picking up speed, as authorities conducted another series of raids in Belgium and Portugal on Monday, March 17th, including on offices inside the European Parliament (EP).
The police found enough evidence to charge and detain five suspects on Tuesday. Four of them, accused of corruption, remain in police custody, while the fifth (charged with money laundering) was released on conditional bail.
None of the names or ranks of the detainees have been released yet to protect the ongoing investigation. As we wrote previously, persons of interest in ‘HuaweiGate’ include at least 15 MEPs—suspected of “active corruption, forgery of documents, and money laundering”—but no information about their identity or political groups has been made public.
According to prosecutors, the alleged misconduct—involving bribery in exchange for furthering the political interests of Huawei and, by extension, of the Chinese government—took place “regularly and very discreetly from 2021 to the present day, under the guise of commercial lobbying.”
The scope of the investigation covers accepting
remuneration for taking political positions, excessive gifts like food and travel expenses, and regular invitations to football matches … with a view to promoting purely private commercial interests in the context of political decisions.
While waiting for the names to drop, last week we compiled all available records of recent meetings between MEPs and Huawei representatives. The list shows that the members of the mainstream ‘Ursula coalition’—i.e. the European People’s Party, S&D, Renew, and Greens—are the most likely candidates, despite their years of accusing conservatives of selling out to China.
This scenario seems more to emerge as EP president Roberta Metsola (EPP) is now desperately trying to get ahead of the scandal and save what’s left of the mainstream parties’ reputations.
Trying to downplay the significance of the case—which could rival the Qatargate scandal from a few years ago—Metsola said, “There will always be people who will try to break the rules.” Still, she praised the anti-corruption rules put in place in the EP Parliament after Qatargate, thanks to which “these things can get caught and can get caught earlier.”
Nonetheless, the EP president stressed that whatever the allegations, the scandal shouldn’t be viewed as indicative of the collective guilt of a political group or the Parliament in general. She underlined:
The one thing I will not do is allow the allegations or the alleged work of potentially a few individuals, to tarnish the work of hundreds of others.
