BREAKING NEWS: YET ANOTHER “Chinese interference” case vanished into thin air in the west this week.
Hong Kong resident William Majcher has just been acquitted of a serious charge of being “an agent for China” in a court case in Canada.
Claims made by the CSIS, a Canadian intelligence agency which works with the United States’ CIA, were rejected by a judge.
Majcher will be able to return to his young children in Hong Kong.
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‘CHINA IS CANADA’S FRIEND’
The case was watched closely because of its geopolitical overtones. It was originally a US inspired Canadian case against China.
But Majcher’s lawyer Ian Donaldson noted that international allegiances have been diametrically altered in recent times.
“Today, of course, with irony, America is thought to be the enemy and China is our friend,” Donaldson told the press yesterday.
The case is extremely revealing about east-west perspectives.
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FINANCIAL INVESTIGATOR
Bill Majcher used to be financial crime investigator in Canada but retired to live in Hong Kong. Like many ex-police officers, he offered his skills as a consultant on investigations.
One case he looked into concerned a wealthy Chinese man who had left China in the wake of serious fraud allegations and apparently settled in the Vancouver area.
But when Majcher took a trip from Hong Kong to Canada in 2023, he was arrested, and told he had breached Canada’s Security of Information Act.
To build a case against him, the authorities paraded a particular email. This showed that Majcher was chasing a fraudster who had been tracked to Canada. It implied that he was doing this, for a fee, as an investigator.
But the Canadian authorities used the email to paint Majcher as a spy for the communists!
They said Majcher “used his knowledge and his extensive network of contacts in Canada to obtain intelligence or services to benefit the People’s Republic of China”.
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JUDGE CRITICIZES ARREST DECISION
He was found not guilty on Wednesday. British Columbia supreme court justice Martha Devlin described the evidence by prosecutors as “entirely circumstantial”.
A much more reasonable interpretation of the email, Majcher’s lawyer Donaldson said, was that the investigator "was talking about chasing a fraudster for a bunch of money."
The judge criticized the Canadian authorities for making an arrest because of a “hunch or generalized suspicion”.
The press behaved badly, of course. One Canadian journalist distributed a picture of Majcher with triads in a casino as evidence that he was a bad guy.
But the Friday news project in Hong Kong showed that the image actually came from a movie filmed in Macau, in which Majcher had a bit part.
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WEST REBRANDS FRAUDSTERS AS ‘DISSIDENTS’
The big picture problem is this. When western investigators are tracking fraudsters who have escaped from the west to Hong Kong, they get co-operation. The bad guys are arrested. Justice is done. Everybody’s happy.
But when investigators track down a fraudster from China who has escaped to a “five eyes” country, especially the US or UK, the opposite happens.
The fraudsters are protected as “Chinese dissidents” and investigators are painted as espionage agents. Here’s an example of the Wall St Journal doing exactly that his week. (see video)
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CELEBRATED DISSIDENT WAS MAJOR CONMAN
The most dramatic example is billionaire Guo Wengui. After the Chinese government launched a corruption crackdown in 2015, the Shandong-born man moved to the United States (using the name Miles Kwok).
The Chinese government warned the US that he was a dangerous fraudster, but the real story was flipped in the west.
Guo was celebrated in the west as a noble “Chinese dissident”. The investigators wanting to bring him to justice were painted as the bad guys.
But US politicians and journalists should have listened to the Chinese.
Since then, Guo has had multiple run-ins with the law, he was arrested by U.S. federal authorities in March 2023 on fraud charges involving hundreds of millions of US dollars, and he was convicted of fraud in New York in July 2024.