The agreement set up a formal communications channel between Huawei and the investment review agency, which Huawei welcomed as a way to demonstrate its transparency, said Huawei Group Chief Technology Officer Matt Bross. He spoke in an interview during an event celebrating Huawei's tenth anniversary in the U.S. and the grand opening of a research and development center in Santa Clara, California.

Huawei has come under close scrutiny by some regulators and elected officials in the U.S. because of concerns that network equipment made by the Chinese company could be vulnerable to manipulation from China. In particular, some U.S. officials have raised concerns about possible "back door" code in Huawei software that would let the Chinese government or military disrupt or spy on U.S telecommunications. Huawei has said repeatedly that those concerns are unfounded because Huawei has no government or military ownership.

The CFIUS is an inter-agency committee, led by the Secretary of the Treasury, that reviews transactions that could result in control of a U.S. business by a foreign entity. It seeks to determine the impact of such deals on U.S. national security. The CFIUS could not be reached Wednesday for comment

When Huawei's U.S.-based subsidiary FutureWei acquired the intellectual property from 3Leaf for about US$2 million, its legal counsel concluded that the company did not have to submit the deal to CFIUS for review. But later, another FutureWei counsel, in Washington, D.C., concluded that it wasn't clear whether the deal had to undergo the review, Bross said.

FutureWei then submitted the acquisition to CFIUS for review. The situation presented an administrative challenge because it wasn't clear how to craft a mitigation agreement -- an arrangement for offsetting the potential harm to security -- for an acquisition that had already taken place, Bross said. CFIUS eventually recommended that FutureWei divest the property it had bought, though it didn't force the company to do so.