- A book chronicling former Alstom executive’s imprisonment in the US on bribery charges is being read by Huawei employees
- The American Trap is the top-selling book on Chinese e-commerce sites and goes on sale in Hong Kong on Friday
When photos of Huawei Technologies founder Ren Zhengfei showing journalists around his office began to circulate this week, there was a book on his desk that caught the eye of the Chinese internet community. The tome, a Chinese translation of Le Piège Américain, or The American Trap, was written by Frenchman Frederic Pierucci, a former executive with French rail transport company Alstom, about his five-year-long tussle with the US Department of Justice.
The American Trap, which was released in France in January, was the top-selling business management book on JD.com and No 1 new title on Dangdang.com, two popular Chinese e-commerce sites. The book, written with journalist Matthieu Aron, goes on sale in Hong Kong on Friday.
The book has captured the imagination of Chinese readers because it mirrors in some ways what happened to Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, who was detained in Vancouver on December 1 and is out on bail and facing extradition to the US on allegations of helping defraud banks to circumvent US sanctions on Iran.
Pierucci was arrested as he disembarked from a Cathay Pacific flight in New York in 2013. He pleaded guilty to charges of authorising bribes to Indonesian officials to win a boiler plant order, under an anti-corruption law that allowed the US to pursue cases overseas if the transaction was made in US dollars or email had passed through US servers.
Pierucci ended up serving two years in prison in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and was also put on parole for three years. He claims that the anti-corruption investigation was motivated by the US helping General Electric in its acquisition of Alstom’s energy business. Pierucci now advises companies on their anti-corruption policies.
In an interview with the South China Morning Post from Paris, Pierucci said that Europe was previously a big target of America’s extraterritorial laws, while China is the next target, citing the cases of Huawei and ZTE Corp as examples. Huawei was added to a US trade blacklist this month, prohibiting it from doing business with American companies without permission under a “presumption of denial”.
It is rather ironical that Mike Pompeo avails himself the luxury of criticizing the draft Hong Kong extradition law.