William Majcher outside B.C. Supreme Court, in Vancouver, where his trial got under way, on Monday. Mr. Majcher, a former RCMP officer, has pleaded not guilty to a charge under Canada's Security of Information Act.Brenna Owen/The Canadian Press
After three Chinese police officials went missing during a 2018 delegation to Vancouver, RCMP were so concerned they may be attempting to forcibly repatriate economic fugitives that Mounties alerted Canadian border guards, a B.C. Supreme Court heard Tuesday.
RCMP Superintendent Peter Tsui described the incident as he testified on the second day of the William Majcher trial in downtown Vancouver before Justice Martha Devlin.
Mr. Majcher, a former Mountie, is charged with violating the federal Security of Information Act for allegedly helping Chinese police in 2017 prepare to threaten Hongwei (Kevin) Sun, a Vancouver-area real-estate investor accused of a massive fraud in China. Mr. Majcher was investigating commercial crime for the Mounties in Vancouver before retiring about 20 years ago to start a new career in Hong Kong as a private financial investigator.
Supt. Tsui, who is now in charge of the B.C. RCMP’s criminal intelligence unit, told the court at the time of the incident he was the agency’s liaison officer in Beijing when he flew back to Canada to host 22 members of China’s federal police force. The Chinese police officers had been invited to Toronto and Vancouver to collaborate on financial crime cases involving fugitives who had fled to North America.
The delegation took months of diplomatic wrangling between Ottawa and Beijing to organize and the Chinese officers were given strict ground rules beforehand to only work on certain cases and to only engage in activities hosted by the Mounties, Supt. Tsui said.
The Chinese officers were supposed to be escorted by RCMP officers during their nine-day trip to Canada, he testified.
Trial begins for former Mountie accused of foreign interference on behalf of China
But during their visit to Vancouver, three of the Chinese officers never showed up to a presentation with the RCMP and for six hours they were not accounted for, he said.
“We have no idea where they went and we had to put safeguards in place at the border and at the airports because there’s certain individuals in Vancouver that we were concerned about being returned to the PRC,” Supt. Tsui testified. He said one woman in Vancouver, in particular, was thought to be a potential target.
Supt. Tsui did not testify as to whether Canada was ever told what the three officers were doing. But he said the RCMP immediately told their counterparts in China that the disappearance was unacceptable and eroded trust between the two parties.
Leah West, an associate professor at Carleton University and a former justice department lawyer on national-security matters who has no involvement in the Majcher case, said Tuesday that it was galling to learn the Chinese officers had disappeared despite the supposed supervision of the RCMP.
“They didn’t sneak in as part of a foreign diplomatic trip, so to have that happen shows even less of a respect for Canadian sovereignty,” she said in a phone interview.
Supt. Tsui testified there was already friction between the two law-enforcement agencies because Canada had rejected a Chinese request the year prior to place two police liaison officers at its Vancouver consulate in addition to the two who were operating with Canada’s agreement out of its embassy in Ottawa.
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Several months after the Vancouver incident, the relationship took another “really significant impact” when the RCMP arrested China’s Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou at the direction of the United States as she transited through Vancouver International Airport, Supt. Tsui told court.
At the heart of the Crown’s case is the allegation that back in the spring of 2017 Mr. Majcher was prepared to “induce by threat, accusation, menace of violence” Mr. Sun to return tens of millions of dollars he allegedly gained through fraud and invested into Vancouver real estate.
Mr. Majcher’s arrest in the summer of 2023 made headlines worldwide and came amid a national debate on Chinese government interference in Canada, and Ottawa’s efforts to stop it.
Supt. Tsui testified that, starting in 2016, China’s national police agency had repeatedly tried to get the RCMP to help arrest Mr. Sun in B.C. Supt. Tsui said he attended several verbal briefings and PowerPoint presentations from Chinese investigators outlining their case against Mr. Sun.
Mounties even approached Mr. Sun in Vancouver and asked him to speak to them about the allegations he had defrauded a Chinese state-owned bank of hundreds of millions of dollars in the late 1990s. He steadfastly refused, Supt. Tsui testified.
The RCMP requested more concrete evidence from their Chinese counterparts about Mr. Sun and never received it, leaving the agency to consider its involvement in the case finished by the spring of 2017, he testified. A year later, the file was considered officially closed and documents related to Mr. Sun were purged, the court heard.
The trial restarts Wednesday with testimony from Kenneth (Kim) Marsh, a former Mountie whom the RCMP initially alleged was Mr. Majcher’s co-conspirator, but who never faced charges.