Some 5,000 miles away, Michael Spavor, one of two Canadians detained by China in what is widely seen as retaliation for Meng’s arrest, was in a prison near the North Korean border. When China let him call home over Christmas, it was the first time he’d heard a loved one’s voice in more than two years.
New details about Meng’s life of luxury while on bail — and its stark contrast with the conditions in which the two Canadians are being held — emerged this week in a two-day hearing in which the chief financial officer of Huawei argued that her bail conditions were too confining and should be relaxed.
Meng travels to designer stores in Vancouver where she can shop in private, a British Columbia court heard. She has spent time at an open-air theater “under the stars.” She receives visitors at the larger of her two multimillion-dollar mansions where she lives. Among them: a masseuse and an art teacher.
Under her $8 million bail terms, Meng must wear a GPS monitor and is kept under 24-hour surveillance by a court-appointed security firm. She has an 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew but is otherwise free to travel around a designated area of Vancouver while accompanied by security guards.
The guards are the problem. She wants to lose them.
Meng, 48, daughter of billionaire Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, was arrested in Vancouver in December 2018 at the behest of U.S. authorities seeking her extradition, touching off a geopolitical dispute that has Canada caught in the middle between China and the United States.
The U.S. Justice Department alleges that Meng misled banks about the nature of Huawei’s relationship with an Iranian-based subsidiary, effectively tricking them into clearing transactions that violated U.S. sanctions prohibiting business dealings with Iran. She denies wrongdoing.
Meng’s arrest enraged China. Several days later, it detained the two Canadians — Spavor, a businessman, and former diplomat Michael Kovrig — and formally indicted them some 18 months later on espionage charges for which it has provided no evidence.
In this week’s hearing, Liu Xiaozong, Meng’s husband, told the court that the presence of the guards is difficult for their children, who fear that it risks identifying them to the public. He also said he worried that the changing roster of guards puts Meng, a cancer survivor, at increased risk of covid-19.
But Doug Maynard, president of the private security firm enforcing Meng’s bail conditions, told the court that when it came to the coronavirus, he too had concerns. He said Meng and her entourage put his employees at risk by mixing social bubbles and drinking from the same coffee cup.
“I know I wouldn’t want anyone to drink from my water bottle,” Maynard said.
He also said he saw no reason to change her bail conditions. He said she had received about a half-dozen threatening letters in the mail last year, some including bullets, prompting Chinese officials to press Canada to immediately release her and return her to China.
John Gibb-Carsley, the crown prosecutor representing U.S. interests in the case, said Meng is a flight risk. He said a plane was chartered to take her back to China last May when a key ruling that could have ended her extradition case was released. The ruling did not go Meng’s way.
Kovrig and Spavor are cut off from the world in separate prisons, where they have endured sleep deprivation and been barred from seeing their families. The International Crisis Group, Kovrig’s employer, said he passes the time by walking 7,000 steps each day in a cramped jail cell.
China has sought to deny that the detention of the two men was tit-for-tat retaliation for Meng’s arrest, but a Foreign Ministry spokesman said last June that releasing her “could open up space for resolution to the situation of the two Canadians.”
Kovrig and Spavor were permitted a single call home over Christmas. For Spavor, it was the first call home since his detention. Kovrig had previously been granted a brief call to his sick father. For much of last year, they went without consular visits, ostensibly because of what China said were coronavirus rules.
Meng’s extradition hearings are slated to resume March 1, when she is expected to argue that the case against her is political and that the proceedings should be stayed because of an “abuse of process.” With appeals possible, it could be years before a final decision is made on her extradition.
The judge reserved a decision on her bail for Jan. 29.
Meng can have a bail hearing. But when a reporter asked Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, when the country would provide bail for the two Canadian men, he responded with what he said was a Chinese saying.
“The one who tied a knot should be the one that undoes it,” he said, adding that it was up to the Canadian government to see whether it could “work out a way to undo this knot.”
January 16, 2021 at 01:38AM
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Detained Huawei CFO enjoys private shopping and evenings at open-air theaters ‘under the stars,’ wants bail conditions eased - Washington Post
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