Huawei Technologies made an anti-trust complaint to the European Commission against US technology company InterDigital, calling for an intervention to “end InterDigital’s abuses of its patents allegedly essential to the 3G (UMTS) standard.”

In a statement, the Chinese vendor said that “as a non-practicing entity, InterDigital is seeking to leverage its declared 3G standard essential patents to force Huawei to conclude a discriminatory, unfair and exploitative licence.”

It was alleged that InterDigital’s proposal goes against the need for standards-essential patents to be licenced on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

Huawei said it filed the complaint as “there is no foreseeable resolution” in its negotiations with InterDigital.

So far, InterDigital has not responded to the Huawei allegations.

InterDigital came into the spotlight last year, when it effectively put itself up for sale, following the patent land-grab which culminated in the US$4.5 billion sale of assets owned by Nortel.

While Google was seen as the most likely buyer – having failed to buy the Nortel intellectual property – the search company’s attention was instead drawn by the acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

InterDigital said in January that it would instead “execute on the company’s business plan and to expand the plan to include patent sales and licensing partnerships.”