In a recent scene straight out of a spy thriller, a powerful man, speaking under obvious duress, pleaded with the leaders of his country to comply with the demands of the organization that had him in its grip. Although it recalled the 1970s scenes of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro pleading from Red Brigade captivity and Hanns Martin Schleyer, the president of the German employer federation, after being kidnapped by the Baader-Meinhof Gang, in this case it was actually Börje Ekholm, the CEO of the Swedish firm Ericsson, and his captivity was not physical. Under pressure from Beijing over Ericsson’s home government’s banning of some Chinese telecoms technologies, he feared for the future of his business. His is not an unusual case. In today’s global trade competition, companies are becoming easy prey for hostile governments. Their home governments and citizens should back them up.
Ekholm’s tale, which emerged in Swedish media over the holidays, was a painful one. Earlier, he had sent text messages to the country’s trade minister, Anna Hallberg, bewailing Sweden’s decision earlier in 2020 to ban Huawei and the smaller Chinese firm ZTE from its 5G telecommunications network. The ban hadn’t been Hallberg’s doing; the decision was made by an independent government agency, the Post and Telecom Authority. Ekholm, however, was looking to send a message through her to that bureau. “At the moment Sweden is a really bad country for Ericsson,” he told the minister, implying that Stockholm had let his firm—synonymous with Sweden in much the same way as Ikea, Saab, and the now Chinese-owned Volvo are—down. Unfortunately, Ekholm forgot about Sweden’s transparency laws, which mean all communication sent to the government is public. Journalists found his text messages and published them, to widespread outrage that Ekholm would do Huawei’s bidding.
