(Bloomberg) -- For months, Canadian defense lawyers for Huawei Technologies Co.’s chief financial officer have been gearing up to battle a U.S. extradition request they’d said would be "exceptionally" complex involving reams of documents. It turns out it’s just 33 pages long.
The Canadian proceedings, in other words, are unlikely to shed much more light on what kind of evidence exactly the U.S. has amassed against Meng Wanzhou, who is also the daughter of Huawei’s billionaire founder Ren Zhengfei and is sought by the U.S. on fraud charges.
In a preliminary hearing on Thursday, the Supreme Court of British Columbia laid out a road map for Meng’s case, ordering the start of extradition hearings on Jan. 20 -- the day when crown prosecutors will also present for the first time the full U.S. request, known as the record of the case.
"It would be helpful to have them well in advance," Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes told the crown prosecutors. "I understand they’re quite complex."
Not as complicated as her defense describes them, responded crown lawyer John Gibb-Carsley. When asked how long the request was, he said, "The record of the case is 25 pages and supplement is eight pages." Just a tad more than the 25-page U.S. indictment already filed in January.
The U.S. accuses Meng of tricking banks into conducting transactions for Huawei that may have violated U.S. sanctions on Iran. The main pillar of the U.S. case appears, so far, to be a PowerPoint she presented at a huddle in a Hong Kong teahouse with an HSBC Holdings Plc banker about six years ago.
Since her arrest last December, Meng has been living under house arrest in Vancouver. Another round of preliminary hearings is set to start on Sept. 23.
Below is the timeline set by the court on Thursday and is subject to change.
MENG’S ROAD MAP | |
| Sept 23-Oct 4, 2019 | Preliminary disclosure hearings. Meng’s defense seeks more details from prosecutors of her arrest in Dec. 2018 at Vancouver’s airport. |
| Jan 20-24, 2020 | Formal extradition hearings begin. First issue to be tackled is double criminality -- can the alleged crime be considered a crime in Canada? |
| Post-Jan 24, 2020 | Ruling on double criminality. If the judge finds the U.S. case doesn’t meet that threshold, she could order Meng’s release. |
| Apr 27-30, 2020 | Hearings as defense tries to introduce evidence. Under Canadian extradition law, the defense can only enter evidence that goes to the question of whether or not a crime was committed. |
| Jun 15-26, 2020 | Hearings on abuse of process. Meng’s lawyers will try to have the case thrown out arguing it’s politicized and that her constitutional rights were violated during her arrest. |
| Sept 28-Oct 9, 2020 | So-called sufficiency hearings: whether the U.S. evidence is sufficient to commit Meng for trial in Canada if the conduct had occurred here. |
| Post-Oct 9, 2020 | Supreme Court of British Columbia decision on extradition |
| *Nov 16-27, 2020 | *Two extra weeks have been blocked off in case more time is necessary. |
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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