The four are suspected for active corruption and membership of a criminal organization. A fifth person was suspected for money laundering, but was released under certain conditions.
The four people who were placed under arrest warrant appeared before the Brussels council chamber on Tuesday. He has extended their provisional detention by a month. On Monday, new house searches also took place in the investigation, this time in the European Parliament, according to the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Read too. Searches in investigation into corruption in European Parliament at Huawei-Lobbying
From 2021 to now
The Federal Public Prosecutor has been conducting an investigation into corruption practices that are related to lobbying by Huawei. According to the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office, corruption would have taken regular and very discreet from 2021 to the present, under the guise of commercial lobbying and in various forms, such as reimbursements for taking political views or excessive gifts such as restaurant and travel costs or regular invitations for football matches.
“Power benefits”
“All that with a view to promoting purely private commercial interests in the context of political decisions,” says the federal public prosecutor. “The capital benefits related to the alleged corruption may be mixed with financial flows related to the charging of costs for conferences and were paid to various intermediaries, with the intention of disguising the illegal character or to enable the perpetrators to avoid the consequences of their actions. From this point of view, the investigation is also focused on the investigation.”
The intention of the bribery practices would have been to offer his weather work and lobbying from Washington -that the Chinese telecom company wanted to exclude sensitive contracts -to contradict the accusations of espionage by Huawei, and to argue for the European market open to Chinese investments.
21 searches in our country and Portugal
In that study, 21 searches took place last Thursday, in the Brussels -Capital Region, Flanders, and Wallonia but also in Portugal. In addition, various people were arrested for interrogation. The offices of two parliamentary employees of the European Parliament were also sealed. Among other things, it is in those offices that house searches were carried out on Monday, reports the Federal Public Prosecutor on Tuesday.
The federal public prosecutor does not comment on the people involved in the investigation, but according to various media, the most important target of the judicial investigation would be Valerio Ottati (41), since 2019 the director of Public Relations of the Huawei office that provides the relationships with the European Parliament. The resident of Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe was previously a parliamentary employee of two Italian EU MPs for ten years.
One or more MEPs would have received deposits through a company in Portugal, reason why house searches took place there on Thursday. The investigators would have about fifteen elected representatives of different political tendencies, but at least for the time being there would be no Belgians in between.