Late last summer, officials working for a secretive US government committee that vets foreign takeovers on national security grounds came across a puzzling find during what one insider said was a routine review of Huawei, a company that was prominent on the government’s radar screen.

The officials stumbled across the LinkedIn page of one of the founders of a company called 3 Leaf, a California-based maker of cloud computing technology, who was listed as a “Huawei consultant”, according to the person’s account.

The discovery was the first indication for the Committee on Foreign Investment (Cfius) that Huawei, a company that had been forced to abandon a bid for a US technology company two years earlier because of objections by the review panel, had made another – albeit minor – acquisition without informing the panel.