Belgian intelligence services are monitoring Alibaba’s most important European base, where packages ordered through AliExpress arrive, amid fears that espionage is being carried out for China and that sensitive information is reaching the country. The logistics base is in Belgium, near Liege Airport, where Alibaba has huge warehouses.

The Financial Times has written extensively about how Belgium’s special services are monitoring the logistics center in Liège, fearing that the Chinese state wants to make the most of the economic influence that the PRC has in several Western European countries.

In 2018, the Chinese from Alibaba signed an agreement with the Belgian authorities to open this hub and pledged to invest 100 million euros. The hub officially opened in 2021, but Alibaba has not hired as many people as promised.

After the arrival of the Chinese group in Belgium, a lot is said and written about espionage. For example, the edition of Politico in 2021 had the following title: “Alibaba and 40 spies.”

Liège Airport is the fifth largest European airport for the transportation of goods, and annually more than 220 million parcels arrive here.

The concerns are mainly related to logistics management software used by Cainiao, which manages operations in Belgium and is part of the Alibaba Group.

The fear is that this logistics software gives the Chinese access to information about the logistics chain, about many suppliers and customers, and this information could reach Beijing.

Alibaba strongly denied that this was possible. Cainiao says data from the Liege logistics center is stored on servers in Germany and served by Alibaba Cloud.

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