Court stays summons to Huawei CEO Li Xiongwei, three other top executives

A sessions court here on Thursday stayed till further orders a magistrate court's order summoning Huawei Telecommunications India chief executive Li Xiongwei and three other top executives in a tax case. The case will come up for resumed hearing on December 13.

The Income Tax Department had accused the company and its top executives of withholding information sought by it and had launched prosecution proceedings against them. Following this, the magistrate court in May ordered the executives to appear before it on November 25.

Aggrieved, the company, which has denied the accusation of non-cooperation, recently filed a revision application seeking setting aside of the summoning order.


Apart from the CEO, the Huawei executives who were summoned by the magistrate court were deputy chief financial officer Sandeep Bhatia, head of tax Amit Duggal and Long Cheng, who is in charge of transfer pricing.

Appearing on behalf of the accused, advocate Nagesh Kumar Behl argued that summoning of an accused in a criminal case was a serious matter and criminal law should not be set into motion as a matter of course.

He submitted that at the time of a search operation by the tax department, the accused people had submitted the entire books of account, as were available with them, to the officer authorised to conduct the search.

Behl contended that in this case, whatever was found in possession was provided to the I-T officer, including the login ID and password to access the company's ERP software. Thus, there was no non-compliance and the accused people had not wilfully failed to provide adequate facility to the authorised officers to inspect books of account, as alleged in the summoning order, the defence counsel argued. The counsel for the Income Tax Department argued that the accused did not co-operate and deliberately did not provide access to the books of accounts. The department also alleged that the accused individuals were a flight risk.

"The non-compliance by the accused company and its officers had resulted in obstruction and stifling of search action of authorised officers," the magistrate court had observed in May while summoning the company executives.