The judicial saga has ended which for over two and a half years has centered on the financial director of Huawei, Meng Wanzhou, who left Canada to return to China after an agreement reached with the US Department of Justice that avoided her extradition to the United States for bank fraud and violation of Iran sanctions. The story that saw her protagonist since her arrest at Vancouver airport on December 1, 2018, also involved the two Canadian citizens Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, arrested a few days later in Chinese territory and also released in the past few hours. . Analyst and former diplomat Kovrig and businessman Spavor, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced, are on their way back to Canada.
In the same hours, Meng was embarking to return to China. “Without a strong country I would not have freedom today”, was the thanks to China by the financial director of Huawei, in a message released by the local media while he was flying back to Shenzhen. Meng was arrested at the request of the United States and placed under house arrest in Vancouver for alleged violations of sanctions against Iran by a company, Skycom, controlled by Huawei operating in the country, and accused of bank fraud against HSBC in the 2013.
The agreement reached concerns only Meng, while the US Department of Justice is working on a trial against Huawei, which has already said it is ready to defend itself. Meng’s lawyers have expressed appreciation for the outcome of the affair, underlining that the “princess of Huawei” has not pleaded guilty and saying she is confident of the withdrawal of all charges in the next 14 months, based on the agreement reached in the past few hours . According to a note from the Attorney General of the Eastern Court of New York, however, Meng, in accepting the agreement “took responsibility for her key role in perpetrating a scheme to defraud a global financial institution” and her admissions they confirm that, while she was financial director of Huawei, “she made multiple false representations to an executive of a financial institution regarding Huawei’s operations in Iran”.
Internationally, the Huawei case was immediately seen as a case of “hostage diplomacy” and a personification of tensions between China and the West, with the arrests in China of Kovrig at Spavor widely regarded as a retaliation by Beijing and repeatedly defined as “arbitrary” by Canada and the United States. Up to now, Beijing has denied any connection between the “two Michael” cases and the Meng affair, defending its own judicial system. The two Canadian citizens were indicted for espionage in June 2020 and appeared in the courtroom last March, in a closed-door trial. In August, Spavor was sentenced to eleven years in prison for espionage, while Kovrig did not receive a conviction for the same offense.
The Huawei case also went hand in hand with the tensions between China and the United States, which came to light during the era of Donald Trump in the White House. The measures against the company culminated in the blacklisting of the US Department of Commerce, and Huawei became a case in point of the dispute between Washington and Beijing for global technological supremacy.