Prosecution Of Chinese CFO A Big Mistake!

[JimofPennsylvan]

Today federal prosecutors are so much worse in terms of using prosecutorial discretion than they were in prior times in America's history going back even one hundred years. Using good prosecutorial discretion means you don't prosecute even if the person's behavior clearly broke the law if there is a compelling public policy reason why! If you take the job of prosecutor you take on the duty of having to weather and take criticism for using prosecutorial discretion to not prosecute people it's called having character and geez is it in short supply in DOJ leadership today! This is evident in the U.S. federal government prosecution of Ms. Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of the giant Chinese telecommunication corporation Huawei Technologies, for Huawei's violation of the sanctions against Iran. There was a company working in Iran called Skycom Technologies allegedly what happened is Huawei sold technology to Skycom and ran the transactions through the U.S. banking system denying to the banks involved that Skycom was an affiliate of Huawei and Ms. Wanzhou in her capacity of CFO made many misrepresentations along these lines. The DOJ issued an arrest warrant for Ms. Wanzhou on these bank fraud/sanction violation charges and she was picked up on this warrant in Canada this past December and is fighting extradition. The arrest has infuriated the Chinese government and caused a lot of retaliatory arrest by the Chinese government and has hurt the Canadian government whose citizens are the ones experiencing these retaliations.


This is bad prosecutorial judgment on multiple accounts. Prosecutors can vindicate U.S. laws and create a deterrent by solely prosecuting the corporation, Huawei, and fining them so they don't profit from the sanction violation. Good Prosecutorial judgment would foresee that there would be retaliatory prosecutions and be alarmed by such a possibility especially if it became the norm to arrest and prosecute top executives of U.S. corporation doing work in foreign countries. The standard always has been you go after the companies not the top managers because again you don't want to make your citizens that are executives targets. The other thing is America has been and hopefully will return to being a country that is all about being fair. Why single out the CFO of Huawei, there has been an abundance of companies that have violated the Iran sanctions, the North Korea sanctions and other country sanctions America hasn't gone on a prosecutorial tirade against top executives of these businesses. It is basic good judgment that is called for here you don't go after individual people prosecutions when prosecution of their businesses can serve the American people's interests and doing such prosecutions will cause major international rifts, it's called "How To Be A Prosecutor 101"!

 

[Olde Europe]

This is bad prosecutorial judgment on multiple accounts. Prosecutors can vindicate U.S. laws and create a deterrent by solely prosecuting the corporation, Huawei, and fining them so they don't profit from the sanction violation. ...

Yeah, but Mafia Don ordered the prosecution and arrest to pressure China into a trade deal - so the prosecutor had no option other than to petition Canada to arrest the CFO, and issue an extradition request.

Or so would be my guess. Of course, as you describe, the tactics is prone to backfiring, and it did. Mafia Don has yet to think anything through, and doesn't care anyway. He just wants to look spectacularly fabulous signing that deal with China.