A former high-ranking RCMP officer accused of aiding China in its pursuit of a fugitive began his trial Monday after a B.C. Supreme Court justice issued a series of rulings that have narrowed the scope of the Crown’s case.
The trial before Justice Martha Devlin started Monday with the ex-officer, William Majcher, pleading not guilty to a single charge of violating the federal Security of Information Act. The Crown alleges he helped Chinese police prepare to threaten a Vancouver-area real estate investor in the spring of 2017.
Mr. Majcher retired from the RCMP roughly two decades ago and moved to Hong Kong to work as a private financial investigator. A second charge against him was dropped before the trial began. Justice Devlin issued several pretrial judgments criticizing the investigation that led to his 2023 arrest and the subsequent prosecution.
The decisions had been under a publication ban until last Friday. The ban was lifted after Mr. Majcher elected to be tried by judge alone rather than a jury.
Mr. Majcher’s arrest made headlines worldwide and came amid a national debate on Chinese government interference in Canada, and as the country’s intelligence services faced pressure to show they were addressing the issue after facing accusations of ignoring it.
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In the pretrial rulings, Justice Devlin concluded the RCMP violated Mr. Majcher’s constitutional right not to be arbitrarily detained when they arrested him at Vancouver International Airport.
She ruled the RCMP’s grounds for the arrest were premature and based on a “hunch or generalized suspicion” that Mr. Majcher was conspiring with the People’s Republic of China to hunt down white-collar criminals who had fled that country. She left it up to the defence and Crown to address the ramifications of his arrest being unlawful.
In a separate ruling, Justice Devlin also found Mr. Majcher’s constitutional right to be safe from unreasonable search and seizure was violated when Mounties executed a warrant on the Vancouver home of former RCMP officer Kenneth (Kim) Marsh in June, 2023. The RCMP alleged that Mr. Marsh – who has never been charged – had evidence at his home relating to Mr. Majcher’s alleged work for the Chinese police services.
Justice Devlin rejected an application by prosecutors to introduce evidence from Mr. Majcher’s e-mails about a second job he had involving another Chinese fugitive living in New York. She concluded in a decision last Friday that the evidence’s “prejudicial effect outweighs its only modest probative value.”
The justice also rejected the Crown’s attempt to have an expert testify on Chinese campaigns to prosecute financial criminals who had fled the country.
In her rulings, Justice Devlin did, however, allow the Crown to introduce evidence from Mr. Majcher’s personal e-mails obtained by the FBI and forwarded to the RCMP.
The Crown is alleging Mr. Majcher was prepared to “induce by threat, accusation, menace of violence” Hongwei (Kevin) Sun to return tens of millions of dollars he allegedly gained through fraud and invested into Vancouver real estate.
Mr. Sun had refused to speak to the RCMP about China’s allegations that he had defrauded a Chinese state-owned bank of hundreds of millions of dollars in the late 1990s.
The Crown has signalled in earlier submissions that Mr. Majcher’s e-mail to an associate in June, 2017, will be a “central piece of their evidence” at the trial.
“The Chinese police have opened a task force and standing by to issue a global arrest warrant,” the e-mail said, according to the court ruling.
“I hope to have a copy of the warrant before it is issued so we can impress upon the crook that we hold the keys to his future,” it said, adding, “The Chinese want to use this as a precedent case to settle economic crimes quietly and expeditiously.”
The ruling includes a further e-mail in which Mr. Majcher apparently wrote that if the unnamed “target” co-operated, he hoped to settle the matter within a few weeks.
“If he fights then [there] will be extradition request and lengthier process but we feel he is motivated to co-operate as we can guarantee him his passport and no jail time.”
Former Mountie and prominent anti-money-laundering expert Peter German took the stand as the first witness Monday. He testified he once supervised Mr. Majcher when he oversaw the agency’s nascent financial-crime units. He said his former colleague was accomplished at doing undercover work and guiding confidential sources but was “prone to hyperbole.”
The RCMP’s national-security unit in Montreal began the investigation into Mr. Majcher in the fall of 2021 after it received information from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service that he may have been involved “in covert extrajudicial activities undertaken in other countries on behalf of the Chinese police,” according to a recent ruling.
With a report from The Canadian Press