A federal judge in the US has scheduled a January 2026 trial date for the US Justice Department's (DOJ) long-running criminal case against China's Huawei, which has been accused of sanctions evasion and intellectual property theft.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, settlement talks between the two parties faltered last week.

“The reason we’re here today is that the settlement discussions ended in an impasse,” said Assistant US Attorney Alexander Solomon last week. “We think it would be prudent to schedule a trial date.”

The date has initially been set as a placeholder. The case began back in 2018 when Huawei was indicted on bank fraud charges and accused of misleading HSBC and other banks about its business in Iran, which has been subject to US sanctions.

WSJ reports that federal prosecutors from the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York and lawyers for Huawei agreed to a busy pretrial schedule on Thursday after saying their negotiations had faltered.

The vendor reportedly intends to file a motion to sever the case into two separate trials.

As part of the initial allegations relating to Huawei's ties with Iran, Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, and daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei, was arrested in Canada over allegations of violating US trade sanctions.

Meng struck a deal in 2021 for the charges to be dismissed this month, four years after she was arrested in Canada on a US warrant. She was held in the country under house arrest.

She had been accused of committing bank fraud to mislead HSBC into providing services for a Huawei division that was violating US sanctions in Iran.

As part of the deal, Meng acknowledged that she made false statements to the bank about the company's dealings in Iran. Huawei as a whole has pleaded not guilty to similar charges.

Huawei has repeatedly been accused of being a national security risk in the US, a charge it denies. After several smaller bans, last month the US banned sales of the company's equipment in the country.

The vendor recently reported that its net profit more than doubled last year, up 140 percent to $12 billion.