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Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies Co., is set to spend several more months under house arrest in his fight to avoid extradition from Canada to New York in a criminal case that has strained US-China relations.
While the issue has been going on for more than two years, her lawyers asked the British Columbia Supreme Court on Monday to suspend proceedings until August to give them time to examine documents from Huawei’s bank, HSBC Bank Plc, which have just been released by order of a Hong Kong court.
These documents “could be of great value for the final decision in this case,” Meng’s lawyer, Richard Peck, told the court. “We’ve all worked hard and efficiently to present a complex case, but now we’re at a point where we need a little time.”
Peck also said it was a “good time” for a postponement, as British Columbia and Ontario, where lawyers on both sides live, are currently hot spots in the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
Prosecutors have asked Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes to dismiss the delay request, saying the defense team does not know what is in the documents or when they will all arrive. “I ask once again that this court be transformed into a court of first instance,” said Canadian government lawyer Robert Frater. Holmes is expected to make a decision on the request Wednesday.
Meng was arrested in Vancouver in December 2018, while changing planes on the Hong Kong-Mexico route. US officials accuse her of misleading HSBC about the nature of Huawei’s relationship with Skycom, an indirect subsidiary that did business in Iran, in violation of US sanctions.
Meng’s legal team divided its arguments for rejecting the extradition request into four branches.
Three have already been presented: the fact that the process in question has been undermined by political maneuvers, that the Canadian authorities have abused this process in detaining Meng, and that the US does not have the power to bring the application in the first place.
The latest set of arguments, which was previously scheduled to begin on April 26, involved whether US officials misled their Canadian counterparts in the request.
(Updates with the judge’s decision are expected on Wednesday.)