Meng Wanzhou’s Canadian extradition hearings are over, almost 1,000 days after airport arrest
- A ruling on whether to free the Huawei executive or allow her to be sent to the US for trial will take months to deliver
- The judge is only allowed to consider inferences about evidence that support extradition, Canadian government lawyers say on the final day of hearings
Her battle to avoid extradition to New York, to face trial for fraud, would become a distillation of the tectonic shifts and tensions in global geopolitics. Events in the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Vancouver would reverberate from Beijing to Washington and Ottawa.
On Wednesday, almost 1,000 days after her arrest on a stopover from Hong Kong to Mexico, Meng’s extradition hearings finally concluded.
But although the marathon hearing process is over, a decision by the judge whether to free Meng or recommend to Canada’s Minister of Justice David Lametti that she be sent for trial for fraud in New York will take months to deliver.
The committal hearings in the Supreme Court of British Columbia wrapped up two days earlier than expected.
Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes adjourned the hearing by saying she would hold a case management conference by phone on October 21, at which time she would announce a date for rendering her ruling.
“No one has received a fairer extradition hearing in this country than Ms Meng,” Robert Frater, a Canadian government lawyer representing US interests in the case, said near the end of the hearing.
A single reporter for the local Vancouver Sun newspaper witnessed Meng’s unheralded first court appearance, but by the end of that day, her arrest had become the biggest story in the world; when the bail hearing resumed a couple of days later, about 100 reporters attended.
Huawei extradition battle: Meng Wanzhou and her narrow flight path to freedom
On Wednesday, the process seemed to have come full circle. There was no media scrum for the conclusion of the hearings; pandemic precautions restricted in-person attendance and most reporters were listening in by phone.
Huawei Canada said in a statement: “From the start, Huawei has been confident in Ms Meng’s innocence and has trusted the Canadian judicial system. Accordingly, Huawei has been supporting Ms Meng’s pursuit of justice and freedom. We continue to do so today”.
“There was some truth, but we say not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” said Frater, the Canadian Department of Justice’s chief general counsel.
04:43
How the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou soured China's relations with the US and Canada
Frater repeatedly told Holmes she could not consider the “alternative inferences” that Meng’s lawyers have suggested about evidence in the case; in a written submission, Frater and his colleagues said that only inferences supporting extradition could be considered for the purposes of a committal hearing.
Meng, the chief financial officer of Huawei and a daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei, is accused of defrauding HSBC by lying to it about Huawei’s business dealings in Iran, conducted via an affiliate called Skycom, thus putting the bank at risk of breaching American sanctions on Tehran.
Meng’s dishonesty ‘abundantly clear’, last stage of extradition case hears
The alleged deceit centres on the presentation Meng made in a Hong Kong teahouse in 2013 that was intended to allay HSBC’s concerns about the Iran dealings of Huawei and its affiliates.
Meng denies the fraud charges. Her lawyers told the committal hearing this week that no deceit occurred because Meng had been “crystal clear” in the presentation that Huawei was doing business in Iran, and that no fraud could have taken place because HSBC suffered no loss and no risk of loss.
But Frater told Holmes that Meng’s presentation was “blatantly misleading” because she had not disclosed the true nature of the relationship between Huawei and Skycom.
Instead of being a “third-party partner” of Huawei, as Meng’s lawyers agree she depicted Skycom, the two companies were one and the same, Frater said.
Frater said that had Meng been “forthright” with the HSBC banker, known as Witness B, she would have told him: “Both Huawei and Skycom are working in Iran and have been conducting banking transactions with you; indeed we plan to continue to do so. And you should also be aware, if you are not already, that Huawei wholly owns Skycom”.
Frater said Meng’s lawyers had attempted the “Herculean task” of arguing that Skycom was not a subsidiary of Huawei in a legalistic sense, as if Meng and Witness B were “professors of corporate law”.
In her presentation, Meng described the companies as being in a “controllable” relationship.
“You should have no difficulty finding dishonesty sufficient to make a prima facie case of fraud,” Frater told Holmes.
In their committal submission, Frater and his colleagues reminded Holmes that the extradition hearing was not a trial and that she could only consider the evidence in a way that favoured Meng being sent to the US for trial.
But Meng’s lawyers were trying to offer competing narratives about the nature and purpose of the PowerPoint presentation.
“As you know, it is not your role to accept alternative inferences,” Frater told Holmes.
Both sides agree that HSBC suffered no actual financial loss as a result of Meng’s statements, but the crown’s lawyers say the risks of a sanctions investigation, reputational damage and potential losses to its loans to Huawei satisfied the element of “deprivation” necessary for a fraud charge.
Meng lawyers call US fraud case implausible, unprecedented, fatally flawed
Most of the extradition battle has been devoted to the arguments of Meng’s lawyers that she suffered such an “egregious” abuse of process that the entire case must be stayed and she should be released.
That argument is broken into four branches: that the US case was politically tainted by former US president Donald Trump and others to help the Americans win a trade war with China; that Meng’s Canadian Charter rights were violated by police and border officers; that US authorities misled the Canadian court with “manifestly unreliable” records of the case; and that the prosecution is contrary to international law.
Those arguments are still being considered by Holmes.
03:08
China sentences Canadian businessman Michael Spavor to 11 years for spying
But last week the court began the committal hearings, the final courtroom process before Holmes decides whether to release Meng or recommend to Lametti that she be sent for trial. The final decision on whether to surrender Meng to US authorities rests with the minister.
During the committal hearings, the crown must only establish a prima facie case of fraud – that is, that Meng’s conduct would be worthy of a trial if it had occurred in Canada.
Trump wanted ‘ransom’ for Meng Wanzhou, her lawyer says
In their written submission, the government lawyers said “committal [for trial] must follow if there are reasonable inferences available that support guilt, even if they are not the strongest or most compelling inferences that arise from the evidence”.
“It matters not whether the case is strong or weak, or even whether it is ‘unlikely to succeed at trial’. If there is an inference available on the evidence to satisfy the elements of the offence, the inference must be drawn and committal ordered,” they wrote.
Canadian case law had established that a fraud charge could cover “the entire panoply of dishonest commercial dealings”, and there was “ample evidence” in the US records of the case to justify Meng’s committal, they wrote.
Frater said Meng’s lawyers were trying to argue that unless a lie was told in a specific way, “you are free to tell all the fibs you want”.
“She [Meng] attempted to calm fears that there was risk of any kind … that was the dominant message of the PowerPoint,” Frater said.
He added: “We say that we have met our burden and she should be committed … to await surrender”.
Experts say that regardless of what Holmes decides, appeals are likely, potentially dragging out the case for years.
Meng’s extradition lawyer says US fraud case suffers ‘evidentiary vacuum’
The committal hearings coincided with an escalation of diplomatic tensions. On August 11, the day committal began, a Chinese court announced that it had convicted Canadian Michael Spavor of espionage and sentenced him to 11 years’ jail.
Spavor and fellow Canadian Michael Kovrig were arrested in China in the days after Meng’s detention, and they were put on trial this year. No verdict has been announced in Kovrig’s case.
The Canadian government considers both arrests retaliatory and the men victims of arbitrary detention.
For now, Meng remains ensconced in a C$13.7 million (US$10.9 million) mansion, a couple of doors down from the official residence of the US consul-general. It is one of two homes she owns in Vancouver. She lives there under partial house arrest, allowed to roam the city, but wearing a GPS tracker on her ankle and accompanied by security guards tasked with preventing her escape.
How much longer she remains in this gilded cage is now up to Holmes and Lametti.
