huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou appears in court before her extradition hearing in Canada on Jan. 17, 2020, before being driven Home to home confinement in a private car, with her feet electronically shackled.
Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has taken successive legal actions to prevent the extradition of its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, from Canada to the U.S. On Feb. 7, Huawei filed a letter in federal court in the Eastern District of New York alleging that federal prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence from Huawei in the case, and on Feb. 12, Huawei sued HSBC in the U.K. High Court for access to relevant documents.
Yesterday (18), the Eastern Federal Court in Brooklyn held a status conference on Huawei’s letter, and the female judge said she would enter a written order stating the prosecution’s discovery obligations and the potential consequences for failure to comply. The prosecution said they will respond to the letter from Huawei’s lawyers. What Huawei’s lawyers are looking for is a PowerPoint presentation Meng made to HSBC executives in Hong Kong in August 2013, a PowerPoint document that the lawyers believe is crucial to unsealing Meng. HSBC, the multinational bank, is a key witness in Meng’s criminal prosecution. Meng is accused of conspiring to defraud HSBC and other banks, misleading them about Huawei’s relationship with suspected frontier company Skycom Tech Co Ltd. which Huawei says is its local business partner in Iran, and which the U.S. government believes is an unofficial subsidiary of Huawei used to conceal Huawei’s Iranian business.
According to HSBC documents, a PowerPoint document given to HSBC by Meng said Huawei had sold its stake in Starcom and that she was no longer a board member. The slide described Starcom as Huawei’s “business partner” in Iran. The slides are considered to be a central piece of evidence in the U.S. case against Meng.
The U.S. Justice Department says the document contains “numerous false statements. The dispute now is that Huawei’s lawyers accuse the U.S. of making a misleading summary of the meeting, selecting only a few of the slides. They want the full PowerPoint presentation. They say Meng explained the relationship between Huawei and Starcom. Huawei also wanted the records to better understand who in HSBC knew about the meeting and what was discussed at the meeting. So Huawei’s lawyers are taking HSBC to court in the United Kingdom in a multi-pronged effort to put pressure on federal prosecutors in New York.
According to the Voice of America, HSBC said there was no basis for Huawei’s application in the U.K. “HSBC is not a party to this U.S. criminal case or to the Canadian extradition proceedings.” According to the British judge, he aims to issue a written judgment by Jan. 20. The lawsuit further complicates Meng’s extradition case and adds to the pressure on London-based HSBC, which derives most of its revenue from China, Voice of America reported. Last September, Meng’s legal team also accused the U.S. government of ignoring parts of the PPT document, arguing that Meng had not misled HSBC and asking Canada to halt the extradition process. However, the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, overruled this. A letter filed by Huawei’s lawyers in federal court in New York on Feb. 7 only informed the dispute and did not ask the judge to rule on it. The judge yesterday asked both sides to settle the dispute by March 18, with the next hearing set for May 18.
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