The target of Wednesday’s dawn raid has been on the radar of western security services for some time. There has been growing concern that Nuctech, which manufactures airport baggage scanners for European airports and ports, poses a potentially serious risk to national security. But the European Union officials who raided the Warsaw and Rotterdam offices of the Chinese company this week were far more interested in the company’s spreadsheets, as they searched for evidence of unfair trade practices.
It’s easy to see a touch of the Al Capone in Wednesday’s raid, which was by competition officials
Nuctech is part-owned by the Chinese government and was once run by the son of former Chinese leader Hu Jintao. It has been blacklisted as a security threat in the United States, and supplied devices to Spanish, Italian and Swiss airports, as well as to the port of Rotterdam, where they are used to check on containers, luggage and parcels leaving the European Union.
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