Huawei's Meng Wangzhou leaves Canada and returns to China as US charges dropped

Delicieuxz

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Meng Wangzhou believed to have left Canada after B.C. court drops extradition case

A plane believed to be carrying Chinese tech executive Meng Wangzhou took off from the Vancouver airport on Friday, marking a new stage in a legal saga that ensnared Canada — and two of its citizens — in a dispute between the U.S. and Chinese governments.

A B.C. court decided on Friday that the extradition case against Meng would be dropped after the Huawei chief financial officer reached a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. government.

The deal with U.S. prosecutors resolved the charges against the Huawei executive.

The agreement set in motion Meng's departure from Canada after she had spent nearly three years under house arrest. The plane that departed Vancouver is an Air China charter destined for Shenzhen, the southern Chinese city where Huawei has its headquarters.

As part of her arrangement with U.S. prosecutors, Meng pleaded not guilty in a court Friday to multiple fraud charges.

...

The agreed statement of facts from Friday's U.S. court appearance said that Meng told a global financial institution that a company operating in Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions was a "local partner" of Huawei when in fact it was a subsidiary of Huawei.

"In entering into the deferred prosecution agreement, Meng has taken responsibility for her principal role in perpetrating a scheme to defraud a global financial institution," Acting U.S. Attorney Nicole Boeckmann said in a statement.


Huawei executive to be freed after deal with US prosecutors

US Justice Department attorney David Kessler told a hearing in federal court in Brooklyn, New York that the government agreed to suspend Meng Wanzhou's prosecution until December 1, 2022, and that if she abided by conditions of the agreement, the charges would then be dropped.

He further recommended that "Ms Meng be released on a personal recognizance bond."

Meng agreed to a statement of facts in the case, in which she was accused of defrauding HSBC Bank and other banks by falsely misrepresenting links between Huawei and Skycom, an affiliate that sold telecoms equipment to Iran.

But Meng, who appeared by video transmission in the courtroom from Vancouver, maintained her "not guilty" plea in the politically-explosive case.


I wonder if the case being dropped will lead to the two Canadians held in China on espionage charges being released.

I also wonder if this might have any impact on tariffs against China, which have been causing inflated GPU prices.
 
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Doubt it will have much direct impact on tariffs. Low hanging fruit to dial down the temperature. The case was a bit of a stretch anyway. Deutsche Bank was fined a ton of money for violating pretty much every sanction and no one there was even charged.
 
As a DC policy wonk, I would say:
- The tariffs wars have many more dimensions than just the Huawei case.
- GPU shortages are more due to scalpers and miners than the tariffs.

There have been reams of (very boring) papers written on the topic (going back decades) but it boils down to China generally being a bad trade partner or acting in bad faith on many trade issues the primary ones including IPR theft, government subsidies (CVD or SOEs), circumvention of trade rules (such as transhipping) along with all the more common politics that are / were reported by mainstream media.

There isn't any doubt that in this particular case Huawei did what they were accused of doing. Whether any of this is "right" or "wrong" really depends on whether you think the sanctions against Iran are right or wrong and whether selling tech to Iran was worth escalating to the level of detaining "Huawei founder's daughter" over. This knowing full well it would provoke the CCP (and lead to the retaliatory Canadian hostage taking)..
 
I never met her so I couldn't care less really except to make a post about how I couldn't care less :barefoot:
 
The worst part of this is listening to the Canadian ambassador try to sell that the two Michaels were *not* linked to the Huawei case; That it was all due to International pressure for China relenting. :rolleyes:
 
The worst part of this is listening to the Canadian ambassador try to sell that the two Michaels were *not* linked to the Huawei case; That it was all due to International pressure for China relenting. :rolleyes:
I realize they are trying to spin this so it doesn't increase the anti-China sentiments in Canada any more than they already are, but seriously there are better ways to do it than this as it is obvious BS.
 
Hostage diplomacy wins the day.

That goes both ways, in this case. Shown both in Trump using Huawei as a bargaining chip for US-China trade deals, and that when the charges were dropped, Meng was allowed to maintain her Not Guilty plea - which means she doesn't admit to any legal wrongdoing and the US accepted that in agreeing to the deal to drop the charges.
 
That goes both ways, in this case. Shown both in Trump using Huawei as a bargaining chip for US-China trade deals, and that when the charges were dropped, Meng was allowed to maintain her Not Guilty plea - which means she doesn't admit to any legal wrongdoing and the US accepted that in agreeing to the deal to drop the charges.
Absolutely. Being forced to be the muscle in an international kidnapping because somebody decided to abuse a treaty will hopefully make our future governments a little more wary of a chum's Cheshire grin.
 
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