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NEW YORK (AP) -- A racketeering conspiracy trial of Huawei Technologies began in New York on Wednesday with federal prosecutors accusing the Chinese tech company of a litany of crimes, including stealing technology from American companies, abusing the U.S. financial system and helping Iran snoop on its citizens.
Huawei is the world's biggest supplier of gear for wireless telecom networks, but it is banned from selling equipment to U.S. carriers over fears it poses a security risk. It has also been blacklisted by other Western allies, including Canada and Britain.
Taylor Stout, a Department of Justice attorney, opened the government's case by telling the Brooklyn jury that Huawei committed multiple crimes over two decades.
Defense attorney Brian Heberlig dismissed the accusations, though, saying prosecutors were basing their case on a smattering of anecdotes and some bad behavior by a few of Huawei's roughly 200,000 employees in 170 countries to cast the company and three of its subsidiaries as a corrupt criminal enterprise.
"There was no blueprint for crime," Heberlig said, noting that jurors should keep in mind that there were "real people whose careers, integrity are on the line in this case."
The first witness prosecutors called was Parham Baheshti, who grew up in Iran but moved to the U.S. to study and became a U.S. citizen in 2000. Baheshti, who moved back to Iran in 2003 to be closer to his wife's family, testified that he fed secrets to the U.S. government about his dealings with Huawei after learning about the tech giant while working in 2009 for a small but fast-growing company that was bringing the internet to far-flung corners of Iran.