ZTE has agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges of violating US sanctions on North Korea and Iran and to pay up to $1.2bn in fines, the largest sanctions-busting penalty levied against a Chinese company by Washington.
The Chinese telecoms group also admitted to obstructing a federal investigation as part of a probe announced yesterday after more than a year of talks with the US government. Those talks accelerated after US officials seized the laptop of a ZTE lawyer as her husband tried to leave the US, resulting in a trove of documents that laid bare what officials called a brazen conspiracy to get around US sanctions.
The investigation was begun under the Obama administration, which placed the company on a list of banned entities in March 2016, in effect prohibiting US suppliers from doing business with the world’s fourth-largest telecoms equipment supplier. But the administration of Donald Trump quickly seized on the case as an example of how it planned to get tough on China and others it accused of cheating on trade.