Toronto (Canada), July 8 (EFE). Huawei is convinced that internal documents from HSBC show that the United States (US) lied to Canadian authorities to get the company’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, to be arrested and extradited to the country, a company spokesperson in Canada said Thursday.
Alikhan Felshi, a spokesperson for Huawei in Canada, declared during an interview with Efe that the documents represented a “dramatic change” as they showed that the charges from the US Department of Justice were false and that the case against Wanzhou had “collapsed”.
Currently, a Canadian judge is considering whether Huawei will be allowed to submit internal HSBC documents for final hearings in the Wanzhou extradition case scheduled for August in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada.).
That will be when Judge Heather Holmes decides on the extradition request requested by the United States.
Meng’s lawyers asked Judge Holmes on June 30 to allow the use of internal documents from the British bank before making a decision on whether Canada would extradite Huawei’s chief financial officer to the United States, something the Canadian attorney general’s office opposed.
Washington accuses Meng and Huawei of misleading HSBC about their relationship with Skycom, a company linked to the Chinese giant operating in Iran, to breach US trade sanctions against the Tehran regime.
Filshi insisted to Efe that the US case against Meng “broke down with these documents, because the crux of the US accusation is that Meng misled HSBC and that the bank was not aware of the relationship between Huawei and Skycom.”
Chinese tech giant Huawei has gone to court in the UK, where HSBC is based, and in Hong Kong, where Meng met bank officials in 2013, to obtain internal HSBC documents.
According to the United States, during that meeting with HSBC executives, Meng used a Powerpoint presentation that hid the relationship between Huawei and Skycom, so the management and the Chinese company committed fraud.
Filshi said the documents “show exactly what we’ve said from the start: that senior HSBC executives were aware of the relationship between Huawei and Skycom, and of course Meng didn’t lie to them.”
Filshi added that the information contained in the documents is evidence that US authorities “lied to the Government of Canada and the courts in the hope of securing Meng’s extradition.”
A Huawei spokesperson also stated that “the only fraud committed was the deception perpetrated by the United States against Meng.”
Canadian authorities arrested Meng in December 2018 when she made a stopover in Vancouver on her way to Mexico. Since then, Huawei’s management has been placed under house arrest and he has lived with his family in one of the mansions he owns in Vancouver.
Meng’s arrest caused a serious diplomatic dispute between Canada and China. A few hours after Meng’s arrest, China detained two Canadian citizens, Michael Kovrig, a diplomat on furlough, and Michael Kovrig, a businessman who specializes in trade with North Korea.
The two were tried in March this year by Chinese courts on charges of “collecting, supplying and selling state secrets to foreign forces”.
Canada denounced the “arbitrary” detention of its citizens and that the trials took place behind closed doors without guarantees for the accused. EFE
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