There were rumours ~10 years ago that a planned repurposing of a Nortel complex to government offices was cancelled because the buildings were found to be riddled with (presumably Huawei) bugs.

It would be very easy for them to pull it off vs the other way around. So many Chinese people work in Canada. But practically no western people work in China.

As someone who worked in both China and Canada over the last decade, I'm surprised that we didn't hear more or it from the Canadian side.

I am not a lawyer, but surely there are legal consequences to utilising intellectual properties obtained via illegitimate means, any legal specialists here?

Also Huawei’s ownership structure is notoriously opaque

Yes I was surprised they didn't mention the Northern Telecom part in the article.

This is a claim that emerged a decade after Nortel collapsed, but it makes no sense.

First, recall that Nortel collapsed because of its own bad investments during the Dot Com Bubble, followed by an accounting scandal.

Second, Huawei was barely even on the scene yet when Nortel collapsed. Huawei was still operating almost entirely inside China at the time. It wasn't Nortel's major competitor.