Quote:
Originally Posted by !LittleDragon
(Post 8987975)
But she wasn't charged with anything in Canada? I don't even know if this is considered a trial or not as it was not to decide guilt and sentencing. From my understanding, it was to decide whether the extradition request from the US was valid or not?
I can't speak to the US fraud claims, I don't know enough about it but violating US sanctions? Canada doesn't have sanctions against Iran, why can't I sell a bunch of iPhones to Iran? Because US says it's not cool since they contain US tech? If that's the case, there must be thousands of people around the world violating US sanctions every day. If she violated US sanctions while she was in the US, then that's a different story. |
I think in your case, as well as many people that I encountered wondering about wtf are we doing with Meng here if Canada wasn't part of sanction was the very point that was just ruled.
Meng's lawyer argued that since Canada wasn't agreeing to sanction Iran, her action shouldn't be illegal/crime.
Crown prosecutors argued that it's not about the sanction, but about what she did itself that constitute as fraud, and that is INDEED crime on both countries, establishing double criminality (consider as crime in both countries).
More specifically, Meng's lawyer wants a very SPECIFIC interpretation of what constitute as fraud: if only US was sanctioning Iran, then even if the case were in Canada, since Canada wasn't sanctioning Iran, what she did was fine as we didn't block such TRANSACTION (pay attention to this, as they narrowed it down to this, and how the judge interpreted it).
What the judge ended up ruling was the ACTION itself and the interpretation of fraud. Judge didn't want to set a precedent where fraud, or any crime for that matter can have a very specific and narrow interpretation. Just because your bad ACTION is skipping certain technicalities doesn't mean that the specific TRANSACTION itself just became legal.
Thus, in her ruling (yes, I read it), she specified a hypothetical scenario where this thing played out on Canadian side with CDN entities risking on breaching laws. Such ACTION (lying to banks) IS FRAUD, PERIOD. And the fact that the TRANSACTION wasn't TECHNICALLY considered a crime by ITSELF because Canada wasn't sanctioning Iran became irrelevant.
tl:dr - Think it this way, if you were lying (about other things) to bank in order to obtain a loan, that's FRAUD, even though you technically qualify for the loan. You just made shit up to make you look better. The technical qualification doesn't cover the FACT that you lied to the bank, which is a crime. Hence double criminality was established.