In what is surely another dimension atop of the current political climate between the US and China, Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou’s attorneys file paperwork with Canadian Minister of Justice David Lametti to withdraw Wanzhou’s US extradition.
The reason Wanzhou’s attorneys request the withdrawal of her US extradition concerns the nature of her arrest. She was arrested in Canada because of Iran sanctions violations. Wanzhou’s attorneys say that Canada cannot prosecute Wanzhou for Iran sanctions because Canada did not request her arrest in the first place and Canada is not the country of offense; rather, the US is the country that moved Canada to make the arrest.
They say that Meng Wanzhou is a Chinese citizen, whose actions were committed in a foreign country (Hong Kong) at a foreign bank. Neither the US nor Canada witnessed these Iran sanctions, so neither the US nor Canada can make such an arrest.
It is true that the arrest was not made in the US and that the crime wasn’t committed in the US, but perhaps Wanzhou’s current Canadian location is designed by the US to be something of a “neutral” ground on which to hold what it perceives as an international criminal. As much as the US has angered China as of late, if the US actually brought Wanzhou into its territory, China would have been angered by that, even more so than Wanzhou’s location in Canada.
Former Canadian ambassador to China, David Mulroney, says that Canada’s actions demonstrate that the country wants to do the right thing but that its action to arrest Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei’s daughter and Huawei’s CFO could hurt Canada-China relations because China could perceive this arrest as nothing more than “Canada kowtowing to Donald Trump,” he said in an interview to The Globe And Mail.
Wanzhou’s attorneys filing a request for an extradition withdrawal is just one more action in China’s response to the US as of late. US President Donald Trump has been hitting hard at China in the current international trade war with the country, going so far as to target its top MDM (mobile device manufacturer), Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
Donald Trump declared war against China when he placed Huawei on the US Entity List last month and forbade American companies from doing business with Huawei. Google then set Huawei’s Android license into revocation mode, though a three-month reprieve allows Huawei to update its Android-powered devices until August 19th.
Facebook has come forward in recent days claiming that it will no longer pre-load its apps such as Facebook and Facebook Messenger onto Huawei smartphones and tablets.
Walmart, B&H Photo, and more recently, FedEx, have come under fire for their decisions to stop selling and shipping Huawei phones, respectively. Huawei’s new Matebook laptop, its globally popular Watch GT, and its futuristic Mate X foldable smartphone could all be seen as casualties of this international trade war.
Huawei has been accused of other crimes as well such as trade theft, and the company has a history of it, as US carrier T-Mobile can attest. In response to its Android license revocation and the loss of business partners Qualcomm, Intel, British entity ARM, Google, Facebook, and others, the company has taken to calling in its 5G patent royalties from top US carrier Verizon Wireless, by pushing forward with sub-brand “Honor” (many individuals do not know “Honor” is a Huawei subsidiary), and by considering the creation of second sub-brand “Nova” for younger generations.
Huawei’s US R&D division, Futurewei, has distanced itself from Huawei by banning Huawei employees from its buildings, ceasing the use of Huawei’s company logo on all correspondence, and creating a new internal system and parting ways with the old one that was in partnership with Huawei. Sources say Huawei’s US division is doing this so it can remain free to operate as normal without it too, becoming a casualty of the recent Trump Ban.