Who Speaks for You in Brussels? The Hidden Risk in Institutional Representation

On 16 June 2026, the European Parliament voted to lift the parliamentary immunity of Italian MEP Fulvio Martusciello, clearing the way for Belgian prosecutors to continue their investigation into what has become known in Brussels as “Huaweigate”. More than fifteen months after police first raided Huawei’s EU offices, no formal charges have yet been brought against any Member of the European Parliament, and no trial date has been set. Huawei’s institutional access, by contrast, had already narrowed considerably well before that vote.

This gap between the pace of reputational consequence and the pace of legal process is the central point of interest for companies well beyond the telecoms sector.

A scandal that outran its own investigation

The case began on 13 March 2025, when Belgian federal police raided Huawei’s Brussels offices and the homes of several of its lobbyists, sealing two offices belonging to parliamentary assistants. The investigation centres on Valerio Ottati, Huawei’s EU public affairs director since 2019 and, before that, a parliamentary assistant for a decade. He faces formal charges of bribery, money laundering and involvement in a criminal organisation. Ottati was placed under house arrest and dismissed by Huawei.

Belgian prosecutors subsequently requested the lifting of parliamentary immunity for four MEPs. The Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee, and later the plenary, granted the request for Martusciello, Bulgarian MEP Nikola Minchev and Maltese MEP Daniel Attard, while narrowly declining it for Italian MEP Salvatore De Meo. It is worth being precise about what this means: lifting immunity is a procedural step that allows an investigation to proceed, not a finding of wrongdoing. Martusciello has denied any involvement; De Meo, whose immunity was preserved on weaker evidence, has not been accused with anything approaching the same specificity.

The conduct under scrutiny appears to be cantered on a 2021 letter, signed by eight MEPs, urging the European Commission not to ban foreign 5G equipment on national security grounds. The letter does not mention Huawei directly, but prosecutors allege it may have served the company’s interests, and an immunity report drafted for the Parliament noted that Martusciello had tabled amendments to an unrelated competition-policy resolution in the same period that appeared, in the rapporteur’s assessment, to align with Huawei’s position.

Why the reputational cost outpaced the legal one

Well before any court ruling, Huawei’s lobbyists were temporarily barred from Parliament premises, and the European Commission moved to formally recommend that all 27 member states remove Huawei and ZTE equipment from their telecoms infrastructure — a recommendation that had previously been limited to 5G networks specifically. For a company operating in Brussels, this sequence illustrates a point that applies well beyond this case: institutional and regulatory consequences do not wait for a judicial outcome. By the time a court reaches a verdict, the practical damage to market access and institutional standing has often already been absorbed.

There is a further, less examined dimension. According to sources close to Huawei’s Brussels office, cited in investigative reporting, the company’s own management was aware of concerns raised internally about Ottati’s conduct well before the police raid, and had reportedly prepared a contingency plan in case of one. This claim has not been established in any judicial proceeding, and should be read with appropriate caution. If accurate, however, it points to something more specific than the conduct of one individual: a failure of internal oversight over who was speaking on the company’s behalf, and how.

A pattern, not an isolated incident

Huaweigate is the second major foreign-influence scandal to hit the European Parliament in under three years, following Qatargate in 2022. Ethics reforms promised in the aftermath of that scandal — including an independent ethics body — were, according to transparency groups, still not fully implemented when Huaweigate broke. This matters for how companies should read the current regulatory environment: a control framework that has not yet closed the gaps exposed by the previous scandal offers correspondingly less protection against the next one, which shifts a greater share of the burden of due diligence onto the company itself.

The mechanism at the centre of this case is not specific to Huawei or to telecoms. A well-placed lobbyist, undisclosed favours, and a seemingly routine letter or amendment signed by MEPs acting, on the surface, independently — this is structurally replicable for any large company with significant regulatory interests in Brussels, in sectors as varied as energy, pharmaceuticals, finance or defence.

Where corporate intelligence adds value

The practical lesson is not that companies should avoid institutional representation in Brussels — that would be neither realistic nor necessary. It is that the entity speaking on a company’s behalf deserves the same scrutiny as any other significant third-party relationship.

This works in two directions. The first is defensive: before engaging a lobbyist or public affairs firm, and periodically thereafter, a company can verify who else that individual or firm represents, what practices they employ, and which officials or MEPs they engage with regularly. The purpose is not primarily regulatory compliance — it is ensuring the company knows, before or during the relationship, whether a latent reputational risk exists in the party representing it, so it can decide whether to continue, renegotiate or end the arrangement with that knowledge in hand.

The second is competitive: where indicators suggest that a lobbyist or firm representing a competitor may be engaged in irregular practices, mapping that network of relationships and contacts gives a company an early picture of the regulatory and reputational risk surrounding that competitor — relevant, for instance, to partnership decisions, competitive positioning around public contracts, or simply understanding the institutional landscape in which it operates.

In both cases, the underlying point is the same: managing institutional representation risk is not achieved by reading the Transparency Register. It requires knowing, through dedicated intelligence, who has actually been engaged and how they operate in practice.

Conclusion

Huaweigate will likely be remembered as a political scandal. For companies, its more durable lesson is procedural: reputational and regulatory consequences move in real time, while judicial ones move on their own, much slower clock. Waiting for legal clarity before assessing exposure from institutional representation means, in practice, waiting too long. Wayport Advisors supports clients in verifying exactly this — who is speaking on their behalf in Brussels, and how — before that question is answered for them by a headline.

Wayport Advisors is an Intelligence and Investigations Firm headquartered in Spain with international coverage across Europe, Latin America, North America, Middle East, Africa and Asia.

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