(Washington) The United States on Friday closed the legal saga surrounding Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, whose arrest in Canada in 2018 sparked an international standoff that left lasting scars on relations between Canada and China.
A federal judge has officially dismissed the last remaining indictment against Mr.me Meng after prosecutors agreed she had complied with the terms of her suspended prosecution agreement.
The order by Eastern District of New York Judge Ann Donnelly came four years after Ms.me Meng was first detained in Vancouver in December 2018 in a controversial extradition request from the United States that embroiled Canada in a legal dispute with China.
This is the final stage of the agreement which allowed Mme Meng to be released in September 2021, nearly three years after she was arrested at the request of the United States to face fraud charges related to US sanctions on Iran.
Prosecutors had accused M.me Meng and Huawei of stealing secrets and using Skycom, a Hong Kong communications company, to sell tech equipment to Iran in defiance of sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act .
Two Canadian nationals, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, were arrested in China days later in an apparent act of retaliation.
Mme Meng, the daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, has pleaded not guilty to all charges in the deal. In exchange, she accepted a statement of facts acknowledging, among other things, that Skycom — which she claimed was a partner of Huawei — was essentially a wholly-owned subsidiary.
The agreement made it clear that she would violate the agreement if she attempted to contradict or deny the statement, which would then be admissible in any future legal proceedings.
US Attorney Carolyn Pokorny filed the request Thursday with Judge Donnelly.
“In the absence of information that [Mme Meng] violated the terms of [l’accord de poursuite suspendue] until 1er December 2022 […] the government respectfully moves to dismiss the third replacement indictment in this case,” Ms.me Pokorny.
A proposed order accompanying the motion, once approved by Judge Donnelly, will dismiss the indictment “with prejudice”, which would prevent prosecutors from reopening the case.
MM. Spavor and Kovrig, known around the world as “the two Michaels”, left China almost at the exact moment Mme Meng was repatriated to China.
China has long denied any connection between the two cases, despite the timing of the initial arrests as well as their eventual release.