Who is JW00237? The secret Canadian campaign to ban Huawei’s Chinese ‘spies’, and the anonymous official at its heart
- Canadian immigration officer ‘JW00237’ branded three Huawei staff spies in 2016, an effort cast in new light by the US pursuit of the firm and CFO Meng Wanzhou
- Time-stamped documents obtained by the SCMP show the officer tried to veto all three unrelated applications in four days, processing two just 37 minutes apart
Beginning in autumn 2013, over the span of 10 months, three Chinese citizens applied separately to immigrate to Canada.
They applied variously under a skilled-worker scheme and a provincial programme favoured by wealthy businesspeople. Two planned to move to Toronto, one to Saint John in New Brunswick.
Their paperwork joined the tens of thousands of Canadian immigration applications being processed at any given time.
Besides nationality, the only thing the three applicants all appear to have had in common was that they or their spouses worked for Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies.
Yet somehow their applications all ended up on the desk of the same Canadian immigration officer in Hong Kong, repeatedly identified in documents obtained by the South China Morning Post by the initials JW and the numerical code 00237.
And in the space of just four days in 2016, the documents show, JW00237 told the trio their applications would be rejected, on the grounds that they or their spouses were believed to be spies.