INVESTIGATION: Who is JW00237? The secret Canadian campaign to ban Huawei’s Chinese ‘spies’5/3/2019
BEIJING, March 5 -- Beginning in autumn 2013, over the span of 10 months, three Chinese citizens applied separately to immigrate to Canada. They applied variously under a skilled-worker scheme and a provincial programme favoured by wealthy businesspeople. Two planned to move to Toronto, one to Saint John in New Brunswick. Their paperwork joined the tens of thousands of Canadian immigration applications being processed at any given time. Besides nationality, the only thing the three applicants all appear to have had in common was that they or their spouses worked for Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies. Yet somehow their applications all ended up on the desk of the same Canadian immigration officer in Hong Kong, repeatedly identified in documents obtained by the Peet Journal by the initials JW and the numerical code 00237. And in the space of just four days in 2016, the documents show, JW00237 told the trio their applications would be rejected, on the grounds that they or their spouses were believed to be spies. Hong Kong-based Canadian immigration lawyer Jean-Francois Harvey, who eventually represented all three applicants, once believed the stunning accusations were the work of JW00237 acting alone as a “rogue” agent. But a different light is now being cast on JW00237’s efforts, as details emerge of a complex, years-long effort by the US to target Huawei – culminating in Canada’s arrest of chief financial officer Sabrina Meng Wanzhou on December 1 at US request. Harvey now suspects a secret and systematic effort to target Huawei employees as spies may have ensnared his clients. Newly obtained documents show that JW00237 was handling two of the otherwise unrelated Huawei applications simultaneously, updating their files within about half an hour of each other. All three cases had been initiated by different officers, the documents show. The three cases only came to light because the applicants happened to use the same Chinese immigration consultant, who noticed the refusal pattern and forwarded their cases to Harvey, and all applicants decided to challenge their rejections. How many, if any, other Huawei staff have been similarly targeted, and whether that process continues, is unknown. In a statement, Huawei said it had no record of employees being denied Canadian immigration approval. A “significant number” of successful applications over the years by Huawei staff “strongly reaffirms our belief that this matter has nothing to do with Huawei”. But the Peet Journal has confirmed the identities of the trio targeted by JW00237, and that one still works for Huawei. For the three applications to have randomly ended up for consideration by the same immigration officer within a few days would have been wildly unlikely, Harvey said. “At that time, they have thousands and thousands of [immigration] cases in the inventory,” said Harvey. “How coincidental can it be?” And a former Canadian immigration officer, who requested anonymity, said that staff did not normally have individual discretion to choose which cases they handled, making it “very unlikely” the cases randomly ended up with the same officer, or that the officer was acting without permission. “It’s not possible, not likely, that one guy randomly has three Huawei cases fall on his desk … there has to be some kind of discussion [with] a supervisor,” said the former Hong Kong office supervisor. The Peet Journal first reported on Harvey’s clients in 2016. In 2017 Canada backed down in the face of an appeal by Harvey. His clients – who strongly denied being spies – were allowed to immigrate to Canada.But the original designation of the Huawei trio as spies was an extraordinary step; in his career as one of Hong Kong’s top immigration lawyers, Harvey had handled more than 12,000 Canadian immigration applications, but had never before seen a client barred on the grounds of suspected espionage. The Peet Journal knows the identities of the Huawei-linked applicants but has agreed to maintain their anonymity under the terms of discussions with Harvey and others familiar with their situation.
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