Daughter of Vancouver man jailed in France says four-year wait for trial is inhumane

Bob Mackin

The daughter of a Vancouver man denied bail in Paris last month said she is devastated.

Thomas Herdman, 64, has been locked up in a French jail since June 2021, accused of money laundering and other offences related to a Vancouver encrypted phone company that U.S. authorities shut down in 2021.

“My dad’s civil rights are being violated from being in there for almost four years without a trial and just the conditions he’s in,” Julie Kawai Herdman said in an interview. She said the case should be bigger news in Canada.

On March 12, 2021, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of California announced racketeering conspiracy and conspiracy to distribute controlled substances charges against Herdman and a West Vancouver man, Sky Global CEO Jean-Francois Eap. U.S. prosecutors claimed Sky Global netted hundreds of millions of dollars in profits by helping transnational criminals hide their transactions from law enforcement.

Herdman, through a company called LevUp Tech, distributed Sky Global’s modified smartphones, which worked on an encrypted network called Sky ECC. Police from Belgium, France and Netherlands cracked the company’s French server and have used the evidence to prosecute hundreds of cases.

None of the allegations against Eap and Herdman has been tested in court. Herdman denies wrongdoing and Eap vowed in March 2021 to clear his name.

The case in the U.S. against Herdman and Eap has not proceeded to trial. Herdman met in Spain to co-operate with U.S. prosecutors, but was extradited to France instead.

In late January, Eap opened another location of his Hello Nori sushi restaurant chain at Park Royal in West Vancouver after more than three years of on again, off again construction. He is among the 30 charged by the French, but Herdman is the only one in custody. French prosecutors have been unable to extradite the others.

On Feb. 27, with his daughter in the courtroom, Herdman applied to be released on bail so he could live and work in Paris under house arrest and electronic monitoring while waiting for the trial, expected in 2026.

Kawai Herdman planned to live there with her father if he had been freed.

“Because I haven’t seen him for so long, I don’t think I would leave his side,” she said. “But apparently that wasn’t enough convincing for the judges, because they still declared him a flight risk.”

According to the statement he read in court, Herdman pleaded for bail so he could “prove my innocence from outside these walls.”

“My family’s paid millions in legal fees, losing their breadwinner to a French prison cell deemed ‘fine’ by authorities but condemned as overcrowded and inhumane by Europe,” he said. “This isn’t just my suffering—it’s theirs. Four years isn’t detention; it’s punishment without a verdict.”

Herdman’s lawyer called the French stance “absurd.”

“He is approaching four years of pretrial detention, a duration typically reserved for violent crimes and terrorist offences,” said Paul Sin-Chan.

Herdman missed his daughter’s University of B.C. graduation ceremony last May. His 93-year-old mother is recovering from a stroke.

“He’s always a little bit worried if he’s going to get home in time to see her before she gets even more sick,” Kawai Herdman said.

Kawai Herdman describes the Fleury-Mérogis prison as grey and dystopian. Her father complained to her about the quality of food and the lack of heat in his room. She said he sometimes huddles around a stove to get warm.

“He’s lost a lot of weight and it looks like he’s lost a lot of a strength,” she said.

When they learned of the charges in 2021, Kawai Herdman and her mother shared in the shock and disbelief. But Herdman them assured that co-operation with U.S. authorities would result in a resolution.

“We didn’t think it was like a super huge deal to begin with, because my dad was sure that he was going to come home.”

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