Huawei CFO Seeks to Undermine Extradition Case With Civil Suit

(Bloomberg) -- Huawei Technologies Co. Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou is going on the offensive, suing the Canadian government for allegedly trampling her constitutional rights during her arrest in an effort to discredit the extradition case she’s facing.

In a civil suit filed Friday, Meng claims officers failed to immediately arrest her on Dec. 1 in Vancouver on a U.S. extradition request and instead first detained her under the guise of a routine custom check to “unlawfully compel her to provide evidence and information.” The suit, filed in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, is against the Canadian Border Services Agency, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer and the Canadian government.

Her action is “probably an effort to raise the stakes for the Canadian government,” Craig Forcese, a law professor at the University of Ottawa with expertise in international and constitutional law, said by email. “One might call it a form of ‘lawfare.’”

Canada’s Justice Minister David Lametti will ultimately be the one to sign off on any extradition -- Meng’s allegations about her arrest could potentially play into that final decision.

According to the complaint, the officers detained Meng on the jetway as she was getting off a flight, took away two phones, an iPad and a computer, then got her to surrender the passwords to those devices. She was formally arrested only about three hours after her initial detention, the claim says.

Read more on the latest in the extradition proceedings against Meng

Meng seeks damages for misfeasance of public office by customs officials, breaches of her constitutional rights, and false imprisonment, according to the suit. “Each of these causes of action has distinct elements -- none will be easy to establish,” Forcese said.

While Canada’s Charter rights attach to all people, regardless of nationality or immigration status, courts have tended to concur with the government that such rights are “more attenuated at the border,” he said. One Supreme Court ruling, for example, clearly noted that people don’t expect to be able to cross international borders free from scrutiny.

The U.S. is seeking Meng’s handover to face fraud charges, alleging she lied to banks to trick them into processing transactions for Huawei that potentially violated Iran trade sanctions. The allegations date back years -- a main pillar of the U.S. case is a July 2013 PowerPoint presentation that Meng gave to a HSBC Holdings Plc executive.

Likely Irrelevant

Whatever evidence Canadian authorities obtained at the airport is likely irrelevant to that case which dates back years, Forcese said. Furthermore, in Canada, extradition hearings aren’t trials, and admitting new evidence is difficult.

That said, extradition judges can rule on constitutional issues, says Gary Botting, a Vancouver-based lawyer who’s been involved in hundreds of extradition cases.

“If the judge finds that the violation of Charter rights negatively impacted the extradition process, including the fairness of the hearing, he or she will be obliged to discharge her,” Botting said. "Then the civil proceedings will begin in earnest."

Given Meng’s wealth -- she’s the daughter of Huawei’s billionaire founder Ren Zhengfei -- few believe that financial compensation is the motivation for the lawsuit. Short of being released, the civil suit could help her defense obtain more disclosure in her extradition case.

“The obligation of the parties to provide full disclosure in the civil case may simplify the task of the extradition team,” said Botting.

The civil case is unlikely to undermine any key elements of the extradition case, but could still affect the outcome, said Carissima Mathen, vice-dean of law at the University of Ottawa. “It is possible that this could feed into an abuse of process claim whereby the extradition judge is asked to throw out the entire thing. If so, then that would delay the main proceedings,” she wrote in an email.

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