Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou leaves her Vancouver home to attend her extradition hearing in British Columbia Supreme Court, on August 4, 2021, in Vancouver, Canada. (Photo by DON MACKINNON/AFP via Getty Images)
Meng Wanzhou’s lawyer returned to court on Wednesday to fight the extradition case of Huawei Technologies’ chief financial officer.
The final round of hearings for Meng’s extradition case began in the British Columbia Supreme Court in Vancouver.
Defence lawyer Mona Duckett told the court that the United States “misused” the extradition process and accused the United States of acting in “bad faith.”
Meng’s legal team recently obtained internal email chains and spreadsheets from HSBC through a court agreement in Hong Kong, which they submitted to the B.C. Supreme Court, arguing that they prove the United States had misled the court in its summary to Canada and therefore undermined its fraud allegations against Meng.
On July 9, Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes ruled against admitting the evidence submitted by Meng’s lawyers, saying in her ruling that the documents do not “expressly” support Meng’s claims.
“It is only inferences from the documents that support those facts or conclusions, and they are not the only reasonable inferences the documents support,” Holmes wrote in the ruling.
Meng was arrested by the Canadian police on a U.S. warrant in December 2018 at the Vancouver airport while en route to Mexico.
Meng was charged with bank fraud for lying to multiple financial institutions, including HSBC, about Huawei’s business with Iran, leading them to violate U.S. sanctions against the Middle East country.
Both Huawei and Meng have denied these allegations.
Meng was released on bail roughly a week after her arrest, and has been living in one of her multi-million dollar mansions in Vancouver.
Shortly after Meng’s arrest, the Chinese authorities arbitrarily detained two Canadian citizens—Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig—charging them with espionage. The two men have been in Chinese prison since December 2018. The move was widely seen as a retaliation against Canada by the Chinese regime.
Legal arguments are expected over the next few weeks from the Department of Justice and Meng’s lawyers over whether she should be extradited to the United States.
