Meng Wanzhou extradition case: Canadian lawyer says ‘irrelevant’ HSBC documents must not be allowed as evidence
- The documents have no bearing on the extradition hearing and are instead a matter for Meng’s trial, government lawyer Robert Frater says
- Huawei executive’s lawyers say the documents undermine the US fraud case against her
Hundreds of pages of documents provided to Meng Wanzhou by HSBC bank should be rejected from her Canadian extradition hearing because the potential evidence is irrelevant to the proceeding, a government lawyer said on Wednesday.
Earlier, Meng’s team continued their attack on the record of the case that US prosecutors submitted to the hearing; they say the HSBC documents show that the case record is selective, misleading, “manifestly unreliable” and “outright false”.
But Robert Frater, the top lawyer in the Canadian Department of Justice – which is representing US interests in Meng’s marathon extradition battle – told the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Vancouver that the issue was not whether the documents were reliable.
“The issue here is relevance [to an extradition hearing] … relevance in this context means capable of showing that the evidence of the requesting state is manifestly unreliable,” Frater told Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes.
It was not, and the potential evidence was instead a matter for trial, he said.
Frater said there was a high threshold and a rigorous test for admissibility of evidence at an extradition hearing. “It’s not enough to say that alternative inferences could be drawn,” he said.
Lying to your banker to get more credit is fraud
Meng is accused by the US of defrauding HSBC by lying about Huawei’s business dealings in Iran, via affiliated companies, which could have put the bank at risk of breaching US sanctions. But her lawyers say that the trove of documents provided by the purported victim fatally undermine the case by showing that the US misled the Canadian court, and that Meng should be freed as a result.