Jakarta. A senior sales executive at Huawei Technologies has been arrested for bribery, the latest in a string of scandals that has clouded China's top smartphone and telecommunications equipment manufacturer.

Local police arrested Teng Hongfei, the sales chief of Huawei’s consumer business in China, over suspected "non-state staff bribery," Huawei said in a statement on Wednesday (27/12), as quoted by South China Morning Post.

"Huawei has consistently pushed for ethical business practices and has zero tolerance for internal corruption," the Shenzhen-based company said in the statement.

Huawei's consumer business includes sales of consumer items like laptops, routers, smartphones and tablets and was one of the company's fastest growing businesses. It rose 44 percent to 179.8 billion yuan ($27.5 billion) last year, according to the Morning Post report.

The report also mentioned that Teng was one of the rising stars in the company, having won early this year the "Whizz Kids" award, considered the highest honor among Huawei employees.

Teng's arrest was the latest in a series of legal problems that has accompanied the company's meteoric rise from humble telecommunications networks contractor to the world's largest telecommunication equipment maker.

In 2014, an internal investigation found 116 staff members embezzled company money. Huawei later managed to get back 370 million yuan of the misappropriated funds and distributed them as bonuses among its other employees.

In 2012, an Huawei executive was sentenced to 10 years in jail for bribing an executive at the Algerian telecommunications company, Algérie Télécom.

Following that case, Huawei was banned from public sector contracts in the North African country.

Other countries like the United States, India and Australia also blacklisted Huawei from telecommunications infrastructure projects in their countries on security grounds.

Huawei is now the world's largest telecommunication equipment manufacturer in the world, overtaking Swedish firm Ericsson. It is also the largest telecommunication equipment supplier in Indonesia.

The company launched its first Android-based smartphone in 2009 and now the company is the world's third largest smartphone maker after Samsung and Apple.