U.S. Judge Ends Probation for China’s ZTE Telecom Giant

China’s ZTE telecom corporation announced on Wednesday that its five-year probation from a 2017 plea deal for illegally shipping American technology to Iran has ended.

A U.S. district court judge decided on Tuesday not to charge the company with violating its probation after recent allegations of visa fraud.

ZTE said in a midday exchange filing that it received a U.S. court order declining to revoke its probation over the visa fraud case, and confirming that its probation was therefore completed as scheduled on March 22, 2022. 

ZTE stock skyrocketed by 60 percent on the Hong Kong exchange after the news was announced, the largest jump in value since the company debuted in 2004. Investors and analysts were nervous over the past few weeks due to the looming possibility that ZTE’s visa fraud case could extend or revoke its five-year probation.

“The market had been very concerned about further sanctions or further penalties. The news removes this fundamental overhang. This is definitely really positive,” UOB Kay Hian analyst Johnny Yum told the Dow Jones Newswire.

ZTE entered a plea deal in March 2017 for charges of “conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) by illegally shipping U.S.-origin items to Iran, obstructing justice and making a material false statement.”

ZTE was accused of obtaining restricted U.S. technology, incorporating those components into its products, and shipping about $32 million of those products to customers in Iran over a six-year period. 

Prosecutors said ZTE was fully aware that its actions violated U.S. sanctions against Iran since the company concealed those transfers with “elaborate” accounting schemes and false statements to federal investigators. The indictment noted ZTE discontinued its illegal practices when they were exposed through media reports – but then brazenly resumed shipments to Iran while U.S. federal investigators were looking into the allegations.

“ZTE Corporation not only violated our export control laws but, once caught, shockingly resumed illegal shipments to Iran during the course of our investigation. ZTE Corporation then went to great lengths to devise elaborate, corporate-wide schemes to hide its illegal conduct, including lying to its own lawyers,” U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas John R. Parker said when the plea deal was announced.

The deal required ZTE to pay over a billion dollars in penalties to the U.S. Commerce and Treasury Departments, about $300 million of which was suspended on a promise of good behavior. The company also submitted to three years of monitored probation, which was extended to five years in 2018.

The Commerce Department found in 2018 that ZTE made false statements about disciplining the executives involved in Iran sanctions evasion. American companies were prohibited from selling components to ZTE after this finding, a penalty incorrectly believed by some analysts to be a death blow for the company.

2018 also saw ZTE facing allegations of visa fraud for conspiring to bring Chinese nationals into the United States on university-sponsored visas over the previous four years. The Chinese nationals were billed as academics working for the Georgia Institute of Technology, and some of them received salaries from the university, but prosecutors say they were primarily working for ZTE.

No charges have yet been filed in the visa fraud case, but U.S. District Court Judge Ed Kinkeade held a hearing on the charges in Dallas last week, with an eye toward treating the charges as a violation of ZTE’s corporate probation.

On Tuesday, Kinkeade found ZTE was legally responsible for allegedly fraudulent actions of the former research director involved in the visa case, but also chose not to take any further action against the company. The ZTE director in question, Jianjun Yu, was indicted along with Georgia Institute of Technology professor Gee-kung Chang in March 2021.

Kinkeades’s ruling cleared the way for ZTE’s probation to conclude on schedule. The company said on Wednesday it will henceforth make compliance with foreign laws “the cornerstone of its strategic development.”