VANCOUVER: The chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei will be back in a Canadian court on Wednesday for a final round of hearings on her possible extradition to the United States, after nearly three years of court battles and diplomatic sparring.
Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of company founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei, is fighting extradition to the United States, which wants to try her for bank fraud and conspiracy for allegedly concealing her company’s business dealings, through a subsidiary, in Iran.
If transferred to the United States for trial and subsequently convicted, she could face more than 30 years in a US prison.
Her arrest on a US warrant during a Vancouver stopover in December 2018 — and China’s subsequent detention of two Canadians — caused a major diplomatic rift between Ottawa and Beijing.
Meng is due to appear before the Supreme Court of British Columbia on Wednesday for more than two weeks of hearings.
The 49-year-old has denied any wrongdoing, and her defense team says abuses by Canadian and US officials have denied her due process, and therefore the US extradition request should be quashed. Meng stands accused of defrauding HSBC by falsely misrepresenting links between Huawei and Skycom, a subsidiary that sold telecoms equipment to Iran, putting the bank at risk of violating US sanctions against Tehran as it continued to clear US dollar transactions for Huawei.
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