A tl;dr to address some of the obvious questions here: In 2013 she set up a Hong Kong shell company called Skycom Tech. That company (attempted to) purchase HP computers from the United States and resell them to Iran. The deal did not involve Huawei products, but many of the documents related to the deal were labeled "Huawei confidential" indicating they created the shell company to conceal their involvement. She bro…
It's kinda scary that the US can do anything about straw purchases. US company sells to HK company, the stuff becomes property of HK company, US should be completely out of the goddamn picture at this point, HK company sells to Iran, done. The US govt must not be able to do anything about the HK company's intention to resell.
Take Arms. Lets say the US has an arms embargo with a country like Iran. You would agree that it definitely is a violation (and it would be of many international treaties) to purchase US arms as a Hong Kong (replace with whatever country) firm and then resell them to Iran. Now, with computers being the next front of warfare, computer tech is treated similar to arms.
The whole movie 'War Dogs' is about people doing this with Soviet Arms, repackaging them, and selling them to the US. It was illegal, hence they got locked up at the end