By Canadian Press

Mountie says she doesn’t believe the RCMP shared Meng’s device information with FBI

Nov 25, 2020 | 1:10 PM

VANCOUVER — An RCMP officer who oversaw the arrest of Meng Wanzhou two years ago says she is not aware of any Mounties sharing information from the Huawei executive’s electronics with U.S. law enforcement. 

Sgt. Janice Vander Graaf says her subordinate, Const. Gurvinder Dhaliwal, who was in charge of overseeing the electronics seized from Meng in 2018, initially told her that a senior officer in the RCMP’s financial integrity unit had shared the serial numbers for her devices with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

Vander Graaf told the B.C. Supreme Court today during extradition proceedings against Meng that’s what she recorded in her notebook, but she soon understood it was incorrect after Dhaliwal shared emails related to what he reported. 

Vander Graaf says that after reading the emails from the financial integrity officer, she believed they were inconsistent with what her subordinate told her. 

Instead, she understood the email to mean the financial integrity officer, Staff Sgt. Ben Chang, would go through legal channels to obtain authorization to share the devices with U.S. officials. 

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Vander Graaf is testifying at a hearing where Meng’s legal team hopes to gather information to support its allegation that Canadian officials improperly gathered evidence to aid American investigators under the guise of a routine immigration exam at Vancouver’s airport.

“I realized that it didn’t say exactly what Const. Dhaliwal had told me,” Vander Graaf said under questioning by John Gibb-Carsley, a lawyer for Canada’s attorney general. 

“It didn’t say that Ben Chang had provided serial numbers.”

About 10 RCMP and Canada Border Services Agency officials are testifying as part of the evidence-gathering hearing in Meng’s extradition case. Their testimony may be used by Meng’s lawyers when they argue next year that she was subject to an abuse of process. 

Meng is wanted in the United States on charges of fraud over allegations related to U.S. sanctions against Iran that both she and tech giant Huawei deny. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 25, 2020.

The Canadian Press