Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei Technologies has dismissed market rival Motorola's charges of stealing

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confidential information about its cellular network equipment as groundless, a China newspaper said today.

The refutal follows Motorola allegations yesterday that one of its former staff engineers, who now works with a Huawei reseller called Lemko, had provided information about a new transceiver and other Motorola technology to Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei Technologies.

"The complaint is groundless and utterly without merit. Huawei has no relationship with Lemoko, other than a reseller agreement," a spokesman of Huawei was quoted by official China Daily.

The Chinese telecom equipment company had been planning to tap into the United States market via acquisitions. It is believed that Huawei is interested in deals including USD 1.2-billion Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) purchase of the wireless network assets from Motorola, and Ericssons's USD 1.13-billion takeover of Nortel Networks' mobile unit, the newspaper said.

Wang Yuquan, senior consultant with research firm Frost&Sullivan China, told the daily that though Huawei was not successful in its efforts to tap into the US market so far, it may gain some of the customers impacted by the NSN takeover.