A Chinese professor is facing wire fraud charges after allegedly stealing trade secrets for Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., but the troubled Chinese smartphone maker is finding support from a surprising source: Microsoft Corp.

The latest drama surrounding Huawei involves the arrest of Bo Mao last month, though the indictment is only now being released. According to a New York court filing, Mao stands accused of defrauding a company headquartered in the Northern District of California.

The filing doesn’t name all the companies involved, but reports suggest that Mao stole trade secrets from semiconductor company CNEX Labs Inc. and handed them over to Huawei. Notably, CNEX includes Microsoft Ventures as an investor.

Mao, who became a visiting professor at a Texas university last fall, was arrested Aug. 14 in Texas before being released six days later on a $100,000 bond and a consent for the case to proceed in New York.

Where the story of alleged corporate theft takes an unexpected twist is that Huawei itself sued CNEX and former employee Yiren Huang in 2017 for the theft of trade secrets. Reuters reported that Huang was a former Huawei employee who left the company to help start CNEX.

If all that’s not confusing enough, the claims against Mao stem from Huawei’s lawsuit at CNEX, which filed a countersuit. Huawei lost its case, while a federal jury found in June found that Huawei, via Mao, had stolen trade secrets from CNEX instead.

In the middle of the latest drama surrounding Huawei, Microsoft President Brad Smith who — despite Huawei allegedly stealing trade secrets from a company in which Microsoft is an investor — called the decision to ban Huawei technology from being used in U.S. products “un-American.”

In an interview with Bloomberg, Smith said the U.S. government’s justification for Huawei’s ban is illogical and hasn’t been adequately explained. “[Sometimes], what we get in response is, ‘Well, if you knew what we knew, you would agree with us,’” Smith said. “And our answer is, ‘Great, show us what you know so we can decide for ourselves.’ That’s the way this country works.”

Huawei was granted yet another 90-day reprieve from the technology ban in August but remains somewhat in limbo given that any permanent lifting on its ban is subject to U.S.-China trade talks. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Monday that the two countries have a “conceptual” agreement on enforcement concerns, with high-level talks set to resume in October.

Photo: Duncan Riley