Senior Canadian border officer denies destroying Meng Wanzhou documents, rejecting concealment claims
- Roslyn MacVicar, former Pacific chief of the border agency, also denied telling staff not to create documents about Meng for fear they would be made public
- But a fellow officer earlier testified that MacVicar told her not to make a summary of Meng’s case, in case it was accessed under freedom-of-information laws
A former high officer in Canada’s border agency has denied destroying documentation of its handling of Meng Wanzhou, one of a series of accusations levelled by the Huawei Technologies’ executive’s lawyer in her extradition case on Friday.
Roslyn MacVicar, the Canada Border Services Agency’s (CBSA) Pacific regional director general until she retired in March, also denied concealing information, and directing her staff not to create documents about Meng’s case for fear they would be made public.
Meng’s lawyers have been trying to show that her treatment by the CBSA and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) before her arrest at Vancouver’s airport on January 1, 2018, were part of a covert operation, directed by the American Federal Bureau of Investigation and designed to gather evidence against her for US prosecutors.
They say it amounted to an abuse of process, and the US extradition bid should be thrown out by the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Vancouver as a result.
Meng’s lawyer Mona Duckett referred to notes taken by a CBSA aide, regarding a meeting about Meng attended by MacVicar in Ottawa on January 7, 2019. “Start gathering but don’t create,” the notes say.
MacVicar denied this was her direction to staff about Meng’s case, and she had no recollection of saying it. On Wednesday, CBSA officer Nicole Goodman had testified that MacVicar told her not to create a summary of Meng’s treatment, because they might be accessed under freedom-of-information laws.