Sidley Austin lawyers have filed a civil suit on behalf of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. against the U.S. Department of Commerce over an equipment seizure.

In a complaint filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, Huawei said several pieces of its equipment "remain in a bureaucratic limbo in an Alaskan warehouse", after being seized by the federal government in 2017.

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of actions between the Chinese company and the Trump administration. In December, the Department of Justice had chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou detained in Vancouver, Canada; and in May, the company was effectively blacklisted from trading with U.S. businesses. Huawei has sued the federal government, alleging that the administration's actions against the company are unconstitutional.

Sidley litigation partners Frank Volpe and Griffith Green are leading a Washington, D.C.-based team representing Huawei. Meanwhile, in a separate case, the firm's Washington, D.C. partner James Cole is also representing the Chinese company on charges related to Iran sanctions violation, before the District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The Department of Justice has been manoeuvring to remove Cole, an Obama-era deputy attorney general, from the case, citing conflict of interest.

The equipment in question was on its way back to China in September 2017, after being tested in a Californian lab when the commerce department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and Office of Export Enforcement took possession of it. Huawei said the government later informed the company that it would investigate the equipment and determine whether shipping it back to China required a licence under the Export Administration Regulations.

In the filing, Huawei said it didn't apply for a licence for the shipment because the equipment was, in 2017, exempt from the export control regulations. That would change, as Huawei acknowledged in the filing, in May 2019 when the BIS added the Chinese telecoms company to its so-called Entity List.

Huawei said it submitted a formal request in November 2017 for the BIS to conduct a review to determine whether a licence was needed, but never heard back. The company said the normal processing time for such requests is fewer than 45 days.

The Chinese company said it doesn't challenge the seizure itself but claimed the BIS's post-seizure actions were unlawful.

"The defendants have either failed to make a determination whether a licence was or is required for the shipment and further failed to provide Huawei any indication as to when (or whether) [they] intend to make that determination," read the complaint, "or determined that the equipment does not require a licence and, nevertheless, wrongfully continued to detain the equipment."

Huawei is now seeking declaratory relief that the BIS determine whether shipping the equipment back to China violates the EAR or, if not, release the seized equipment.

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