After the U.S. government started investigating ZTE, the company's American general counsel turned to the FBI and spilled the billion dollar beans.
Illustration by Luis Grañena
I was six months into my job as ZTE USA’s general counselor when I realized I was being groomed.
I was 40 years old at the time, and ZTE, one of the largest telecom equipment manufacturers in the world, had offered me my dream job. While I was qualified for the job — ZTE hired me away from its rival Huawei, where I was an assistant General Counselor in its Texas office — ZTE also saw me for what I was: a young lawyer who was hungry. They thought I’d be so smitten with the idea of being offered a top dog position that I’d gladly play the happy idiot for them. And you know what? They were kind of right.
The red flags were certainly there. I just didn’t want to look at them. They had given me the title, “General Counsel,” that I had spent my whole career working towards. But what I didn’t realize was that to them, it was merely a title; really, I was just another worker bee for the Queen Bee back at ZTE’s headquarters in Shenzhen, China.
And ZTE’s headquarte
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