Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei and the daughter of Huawei’s billionaire founder Ren Zhengfei, was on friday 24th September allowed to fly back to china after the United States Department of Justice dropped an extradition request for her.
Meng was detained in Canada on fraud charges in December 2018 at the request of the United States. She has spent nearly three years on house arrest splitting that time between one of her two multimillion-dollar Vancouver homes. Immediately the decision by the DOJ was made, Meng boarded an Air China flight headed straight for the Chinese city of Shenzhen.
This case has long been a source of infuriation for China and has strained relations with the US and Canada. A few days after Meng’s detention in 2018, China detained two Canadian citizens, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, on suspicion of spying. Many viewed this as a retaliatory act by China in response to Mengs detention. After spending more than 1,000 days in detention, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were released by Chinese authorities last week.
Critics have accused China of treating the Michaels as leverage and using them as part of what is known as “hostage diplomacy”. China has refuted this claim.
The release of Meng and the Micheals will ease tensions between Canada and China but this may signal a rift between their diplomatic relations.
As part of the deal, Ms Meng agreed to a “statement of facts” admitting that she knowingly made false statements to HSBC.The Department Of Justice stated that Ms Meng had “taken responsibility for her principal role in perpetrating a scheme to defraud a global financial institution”
Huawei is the largest telecom equipment maker in the world and has faced allegations in the past that the Chinese authorities would use its equipment for spying – accusations it has denied. The US imposed sanctions on Huawei In 2019 and placed it on an export blacklist, a decision that still stands today.
Australia, Sweden, Japan and The UK have also banned Huawei, as others like India and France have fallen just shy of a ban.
Tik Tok and other Chinese tech companies operating in the US are also being watched closely.
