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VANCOUVER: Lawyers for the Canadian government asked a judge on Tuesday to keep the extradition case of Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou to the United States “in a straight line” and described the evidence presented by the defense as inadmissible.
Government attorney Robert Frater asked the judge to drop the defense arguments and end his attempt to add an allegation that the United States government had abused the process.
Meng’s lawyers told the court that the US extradition request to Canada is based on so many “omissions and misrepresentations that it is unreliable and ineffective.”
Tuesday’s arguments are the latest in a series of hearings in a case that has strained China’s relations with the United States and Canada.
Meng, 48, was arrested in December 2018 on a US court order charging her with bank fraud for misleading HSBC about Huawei’s business in Iran and causing the bank to violate US sanctions law.
Meng, the daughter of Huawei billionaire founder Ren Zhengfei, has said she is innocent and is fighting extradition while under house arrest in Vancouver.
Frater said the judge should ignore the defense arguments about who knew what at HSBC and accused the defense of attempting to litigate the fraud charges against Meng in the extradition case.
Frater asked the judge to keep the case “straight and narrow” and to “refuse to devote valuable court time to matters that have no hope of success.”
The crux of Meng’s argument is that the United States misrepresented the case when it asked Canadian officials to arrest her.
Huawei has long described Skycom Tech Co Ltd as a separate local business partner in Iran, but the US indictment said Huawei controlled Skycom and used it to violate US sanctions.
The United States has used part of a PowerPoint presentation that Meng gave to HSBC as proof of fraud, but Meng and his lawyers argue otherwise.
“No banker would walk out of that meeting thinking that Huawei had distanced itself from Skycom,” Frank Addario, one of Meng’s attorneys, told the court on Tuesday, adding that “HSBC knew what it was getting into.”
The judge must decide whether the defense’s latest accusation is plausible enough to be worth litigating entirely. If the judge rules in Meng’s favor, an additional set of hearings will be added to the case calendar for arguments.
A decision on this issue is expected on October 30.
The hearing is expected to conclude on Wednesday. Meng’s extradition case is scheduled to end in April 2021.
– Reuters
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