US Huawei prosecutors let accused Chinese professor return home
- Bo Mao will plead guilty to smaller charge of making a false statement, while more serious counts of conspiracy and trade-secrets theft will be dismissed
- Professor had initially been accused of stealing a computer chip on behalf of a Chinese company
A Chinese professor accused of stealing trade secrets for Huawei Technologies Co. will plead guilty to a reduced charge and be allowed to return to China, lawyers told a US judge on Thursday.
Bo Mao, a computer science professor at Xiamen University in China and a visiting professor at the University of Texas, will admit to a single count of making a false statement. US prosecutors will dismiss more serious counts of conspiracy and trade-secrets theft, they said at a hearing Thursday in federal court in Brooklyn, New York.
The case, initiated last year, was part of a series of moves against Huawei by the Trump administration, which has portrayed the Chinese telecoms giant as a national security threat. Mao was initially held without bail in a federal lock-up.
The plea is a setback in the federal government’s battle against what it alleges is trade-secret theft by Chinese technology companies.
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Prosecutors had initially accused Mao of stealing a computer chip on behalf of a Chinese telecommunications company while claiming to be doing academic research in 2016. The government’s case against Mao mirrors allegations CNEX Labs made in a civil suit in which the professor was accused of helping Huawei steal the technology.
The case is part of a broader crackdown by the Justice Department targeting Chinese scholars working in American university labs, some of whom have been accused of being “spies” or threats to national security even as they have been charged with more prosaic crimes, such as visa fraud.