reporter2
28-09-21, 12:46
China’s Hostage Triumph
The U.S. lets Huawei’s CFO off easy, and Beijing frees two Canadians.
By The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal
Sept. 27, 2021
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-hostage-triumph-meng-kovrig-spavor-huawei-11632673151
Westerners working in China are officially on notice. You could be arrested on trumped up charges at any time and used as hostages to promote Communist Party interests. That’s the message from the humiliating U.S. surrender to China’s hostage diplomacy in the case of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou.
Canadian authorities arrested Ms. Meng in 2018 at the request of the U.S., which charged her with bank and wire fraud. Under a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) reached Friday, Ms. Meng was allowed to return to China without going to trial. She merely admitted to facts she had previously denied. Shortly thereafter, and right on cue, China released two Canadians it had arrested on phony charges not long after Ms. Meng’s arrest.
China’s immediate release of businessman Michael Spavor and former diplomat Michael Kovrig proves their arrest was a hostage-taking to pressure Canada and the U.S. over Ms. Meng. In China the law serves the Party. But in the U.S. the law is supposed to operate independent of political interests.
This DPA is embarrassingly weak. Ms. Meng admits in a statement of facts that she failed to tell the truth to a multinational financial institution about Huawei’s business dealings with Skycom, a company controlled by Huawei that did business in Iran. Skycom had been suspected of seeking to violate U.S. export control laws, and Ms. Meng was dispatched to reassure the financial company (unidentified in the DPA) in a 2013 meeting that Huawei had sold its shares in Skycom and nothing was legally amiss. Huawei had merely sold its Skycom shares to another company it controlled.
Ms. Meng also falsely claimed in the 2013 meeting that Huawei “operates in Iran in strict compliance with applicable laws, regulations and sanctions” and that there had been “no violation of export control regulations,” the DPA says.
The admissions won’t be much use in other potential cases against Huawei, which the U.S. rightly considers a national-security threat. Ms. Meng agrees to the facts only “to the best of her information and belief,” which is bizarre language for an admission. Is it true or not? Nothing in the DPA requires her to testify to these facts in U.S. court. She agrees not to contradict those facts, but if she recants from the safety of China she will be out of reach of the Justice Department.
It’s hard to believe the career prosecutors who brought this case are happy with this ending. It demeans the rule of law and undermines their efforts to enforce sanctions against Iran. The Biden Administration wants better relations with China, which has been bullying U.S. envoys and refusing to cooperate on climate change (which seems to be President Biden’s main foreign-policy priority). The Huawei case looks like collateral damage in a diplomatic repair effort.
The release of Messrs. Spavor and Kovrig is good news. But China, and the rest of the world, will get the message that the coercive diplomacy of hostage-taking gets results.
The U.S. lets Huawei’s CFO off easy, and Beijing frees two Canadians.
By The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal
Sept. 27, 2021
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-hostage-triumph-meng-kovrig-spavor-huawei-11632673151
Westerners working in China are officially on notice. You could be arrested on trumped up charges at any time and used as hostages to promote Communist Party interests. That’s the message from the humiliating U.S. surrender to China’s hostage diplomacy in the case of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou.
Canadian authorities arrested Ms. Meng in 2018 at the request of the U.S., which charged her with bank and wire fraud. Under a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) reached Friday, Ms. Meng was allowed to return to China without going to trial. She merely admitted to facts she had previously denied. Shortly thereafter, and right on cue, China released two Canadians it had arrested on phony charges not long after Ms. Meng’s arrest.
China’s immediate release of businessman Michael Spavor and former diplomat Michael Kovrig proves their arrest was a hostage-taking to pressure Canada and the U.S. over Ms. Meng. In China the law serves the Party. But in the U.S. the law is supposed to operate independent of political interests.
This DPA is embarrassingly weak. Ms. Meng admits in a statement of facts that she failed to tell the truth to a multinational financial institution about Huawei’s business dealings with Skycom, a company controlled by Huawei that did business in Iran. Skycom had been suspected of seeking to violate U.S. export control laws, and Ms. Meng was dispatched to reassure the financial company (unidentified in the DPA) in a 2013 meeting that Huawei had sold its shares in Skycom and nothing was legally amiss. Huawei had merely sold its Skycom shares to another company it controlled.
Ms. Meng also falsely claimed in the 2013 meeting that Huawei “operates in Iran in strict compliance with applicable laws, regulations and sanctions” and that there had been “no violation of export control regulations,” the DPA says.
The admissions won’t be much use in other potential cases against Huawei, which the U.S. rightly considers a national-security threat. Ms. Meng agrees to the facts only “to the best of her information and belief,” which is bizarre language for an admission. Is it true or not? Nothing in the DPA requires her to testify to these facts in U.S. court. She agrees not to contradict those facts, but if she recants from the safety of China she will be out of reach of the Justice Department.
It’s hard to believe the career prosecutors who brought this case are happy with this ending. It demeans the rule of law and undermines their efforts to enforce sanctions against Iran. The Biden Administration wants better relations with China, which has been bullying U.S. envoys and refusing to cooperate on climate change (which seems to be President Biden’s main foreign-policy priority). The Huawei case looks like collateral damage in a diplomatic repair effort.
The release of Messrs. Spavor and Kovrig is good news. But China, and the rest of the world, will get the message that the coercive diplomacy of hostage-taking gets results.