Huawei CFO's legal team wants US extradition case thrown out

Lawyers for Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou have claimed that US authorities and HSBC are trying to mislead a Canadian court in her extradition case by providing a "grossly inaccurate" summary of the evidence, arguing that the case should be thrown out as a result.
The lawyers made the remarks in a memo, which was made public after a hearing in Vancouver to discuss the management of Meng's extradition case on Monday.
In the memo, Meng's lawyers said the allegations of "deliberate and/or reckless misstatements of fact and material omissions" in the official record of the case are so serious that extradition proceedings against Meng should be tossed.
Meng was accused of lying to an HSBC executive in Hong Kong in August 2013 about Huawei's relationship with Skycom, a company which the US government charged violated its sanctions on technology sales to Iran.
But the defense team said that the summary of the Powerpoint presentation provided to the court is "grossly misleading" because it omitted to include reference to critical disclosures that Meng made in the PPT regrading Huawei's relationship with Skycom.
They argued that the omissions show Meng gave the British bank the facts it needed to assess the risk of doing business with Huawei.
Also, Meng's lawyers questioned the claim that only "junior" HSBC employees knew about the relationship between Huawei and Skycom, but "senior" HSBC employees did not know.
"It is inconceivable that any decision to modify or terminate HSBC's relationship with Skycom or Huawei would not have been reviewed by the most senior management at HSBC," Meng's lawyers said.
New hearing next week
According to the defense team, "that high-level review, which would have preceded the closing of the Skycom account, would necessarily have revealed the interconnectedness of the Huawei, Skycom accounts".
Comments from HSBC were not immediately available. And the Canadian court did not make any decision on Monday, but set the next hearing on June 23.
Zhang Tengjun, assistant research fellow at the Beijing-based China Institute of International Studies, said: "Meng's case is not a simple judicial matter. It is essentially a political game the US government has been playing to derail China's technology development."
He said the US government's pressure and influence on Canada's "independent judicial system" are clear in Meng's case.
"The US government has imposed sanctions on Huawei because it cannot accept the Chinese company as a global leader in 5G technology," he said.
China restated on Monday that the arrest of Meng is a political conspiracy by the US, which is trying to crack down on Huawei and other Chinese high-tech companies.
"The documents fully exposed the political plot of the United States to deliberately suppress Chinese high-tech enterprises and Huawei," said Zhao Lijian, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, adding that Canada played the role of a US "accomplice".
Last month, the British Columbia Supreme Court delivered a critical decision on Meng's case by ruling that the US extradition proceedings against her satisfied the "double criminality" test.
The Chinese embassy in Ottawa called her case "a grave political incident" and warned Canada "not to go further down the wrong path".
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