Huawei hires ex- official of Bush administration (USA)

www.WirelessFederation.com/news: A prominent former Bush administration official has been recruited by Huawei who worked on national security issues. With this move, the Chinese telecoms equipment maker seeks to make inroads in Washington and assuage concerns that it has ties to the Chinese military. John Bellinger, a partner at Arnold & Porter has been hired as an adviser. He has served as chief attorney at the State Department and advised the National Security Council under George W. Bush.

The move also suggests that company is aggressively seeking to convince US defense and security officials that it should be allowed to make acquisitions in the US. Huawei wants to gain market share in the US by weighing a bid for a unit of Motorola. However, there are speculations that the company will move ahead with the bid only if it can be certain that the deal would not be blocked on national security grounds by the Obama administration. After getting the indication that Bush administration would block the transaction, Huawei was forced to abandon a joint bid for 3 Com in 2008. The Bush administration was understood to have resisted the deal because 3 Com was a supplier to the defense department

Takeovers of sensitive US assets by foreign companies might be blocked by an inter-agency panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) on national security grounds especially in the case of technology and telecom assets which are considered critical infrastructure and sensitive.

Any especially controversial foreign transactions have been confronted by the Obama administration though attorneys who work on such deals in Washington say it is only a matter of time before The White House faces a politically contentious bid by a non-US company. A Chinese buyer abandoned a bid for Firstgold, a US gold mining company based in Nevada in February after it was told by the Obama administration that the deal would be blocked.