Huawei CFO’s bail hearing set to resume in Canada

A top executive of Chinese tech giant Huawei, who has been in Canadian custody for ten days, is set to appear at a bail hearing as she awaits extradition to the United States.

The hearing session will resume in Vancouver on Monday at 1 p.m. ET, determining whether Huawei Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Meng Wanzhou should be released on bail.

Meng, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, was arrested on December 1 in Canada on the request of the US over accusations that she misled multinational banks about Huawei’s control of a company operating in Iran, putting them at risk of breaching American sanctions against Tehran.

Her arrest has angered Beijing, which urged Washington to drop the extradition request, and has triggered fresh tensions between the two sides.

Canadian prosecutors have argued against giving her bail, saying she should not be trusted.

Meng had called for her release on bail while awaiting extradition to the US during a hearing session on Friday, citing fears for her health, among other issues, according to court documents released Sunday.

Meng, 46, said in the sworn affidavit that she was taken to a hospital for treatment for hypertension after being arrested. She also has sleep apnea and was treated for a carcinoma, her lawyer David Martin told the court on Friday.

Her attorney also said that Meng would not breach a court order because doing so would embarrass her personally, and would also humiliate her father Ren Zhengfei, Huawei and China itself. He also said that the case against Meng had not been fully laid out, even though the US had signed off on her arrest warrant months ago.

A judge will decide later on Monday to set Meng free on any number of conditions, including high-tech surveillance, or to keep her in jail, according to some legal experts.

Ahead of the ruling, the Chinese Foreign Ministry denounced the incarceration as “inhumane,” and said it “infringes on her human rights.”

China has already called on Canada to release her or there will definitely be “serious consequences.”

The Chinese media also described Meng’s arrest as a “despicable rogue” action by the US, which is trying to suppress the telecom giant— one of the world’s biggest makers of smartphones and networking equipment and China’s largest technology company with more than 180,000 staff and revenue of $93 billion in 2017.

‘A political tool against China’

Pye Ian, an independent political and economic researcher, has told Press TV that “China’s Huawei Company is now the number two smart phone maker globally, outpacing Apple and only trailing Samsung at this point.”

Through Meng’s arrest, “the US is showing its true colors,” added the analyst.

He said the US does not seek “a credible economic competition ever in anything and it is thus willing to suffocate competition by any means necessary, including by extrajudicial means, coercion, intimidation, illegal arrest and alike through other countries even."

Ian further described the arrest as “a desperate political tool meant to intimidate Beijing, which is directly challenging dollar hegemony, while pulling even Washington’s allies towards its economic centripetal force globally.”

Meng’s arrest came at the same day US President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping met at the G20 summit in Argentina, during which they reached an agreement to temporarily suspend a trade war. 

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