News / China

China says fraud charges against Huawei chief ‘totally fabricated’

Saturday, 25 September 2021 5:49 PM [ Last Update: Saturday, 25 September 2021 6:03 PM ]

Huawei chief Meng Wanzhou waves as she arrives in Shenzhen, China, September 25,2021. (Photo via AFP)

Accusations against Huawei’s chief Meng Wanzhou was “totally fabricated,” Beijing says, as Meng returned to China after three years of “arbitrary detention” in Canada.

Meng, the daughter of the founder of the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, who was granted release in a Vancouver court hearing, landed in the Chinese city of Shenzhen on Saturday evening.

Meng had been fighting against extradition to the United States over charges of fraud.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying described her detention as an “act of political persecution against Chinese citizens.”

“The so-called ‘fraud’ allegation against Meng Wanzhou is totally fabricated,” Hua said on Saturday.

“What the United States and Canada have done is a typical case of arbitrary detention.”

“It has long been a fully proven fact that this is an incident of political persecution against a Chinese citizen, an act designed to hobble Chinese high-tech companies,” Hua added.

In 2019, former US President Donald Trump accused Huawei of posing a threat to America’s national security and announced that the US had blacklisted the Chinese company, banning it from accessing US technology.

After arriving at the airport, Meng said, “Being an ordinary citizen, I could not have secured my freedom without the support of my beloved country, and the love of the Chinese people.”

She was speaking to supporters from the tarmac, before leading the crowd in a rendition of a patriotic Chinese song.