A former Polish security officer and a former Chinese executive of Huawei’s Polish representative office have been charged with spying against Polish interests, the Polish government announced Nov. 18.
A spokesman for the Polish minister in charge of coordinating the secret service said in a statement published by the official news agency PAP that an indictment against the two suspects, Piotr D. and Wang Weijing (Beijing W.), was filed Tuesday with the Warsaw District Court. According to the statement, “they both carried out espionage activities against the interests of Poland.”
Wang’s lawyer responded to a Reuters query by saying that he and his client had not seen all the evidence and that the evidence they had seen did not provide any reason to press charges. Piotr’s attorney did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment. In January 2019, the Polish government arrested Piotr and Weijing Wang. According to his profile on LinkedIn, Weijing Wang (also known as Stanislaw Wang) has been working at Huawei’s Polish branch since 2011 and was an attaché at the Chinese Consulate General in Gdansk from 2006 to 2011. He graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University.
Huawei subsequently fired Wang, saying that Wang Weijing had been arrested and investigated for violating Polish law for personal reasons, an incident that had a negative impact on Huawei’s global reputation. Piotr worked for Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ISA) from 2012 to 2015, where he also worked on a project to protect fiber-optic networks from intruders who would steal classified information. In a statement posted on the Polish government’s website the same day, authorities took precautionary measures against Piotr, including bail, a ban on leaving the country and police supervision. Wang Weijing is in pretrial detention. The two defendants face 3 to 15 years in prison.
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