Bob Mackin
Former RCMP officer Bill Majcher pleaded not guilty April 20 to a charge under the Security of Information Act that he committed foreign interference on behalf of China.
Majcher went on trial in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver, accused of preparing to induce by threat, accusation, menace or violence Sun Commercial Real Estate founder Hongwei “Kevin” Sun in order to convince him to return to China with his assets in May and June 2017.
Bill Majcher (IPI)
Justice Martha Devlin heard testimony from Peter Tsui, the B.C. RCMP’s officer in charge of criminal intelligence, about his time in Beijing from 2015 to 2019 as a liaison officer in contact with China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and Public Security Bureau (PSB). Tsui described China’s efforts to investigate fugitives believed to be living in B.C., especially during the Operation Fox Hunt and Operation Sky Net anti-graft campaigns. One of their targets was Sun.
In February or March 2016, Tsui heard Sun’s name for the first time. MPS asked the RCMP to arrest Sun, claiming that he defrauded the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China for 2.8 billion renminbi, the equivalent of $560.5 million Canadian.
MPS said that state auditors had noticed money was missing and there were irregular loans that may have involved government officials. The scheme was centred in the northeastern province of Jilin and Tsui said $120 million had allegedly been taken out of China.
“Summary was quite brief,” Tsui said. “It had detailed that some of the municipal and provincial assets had been used as collateral to collect loans and defraud the banks. It was a historical fraud, probably in the early 2000s, late, late ‘90s.”
MPS provided Sun’s June 1968 birthdate and said he was in the Vancouver area.
In summer 2016, the Chinese officials asked to speak to Sun. Tsui sent a request for a federal team in Vancouver to locate Sun and ask if he wanted to co-operate.
“We were getting nowhere with getting information from MPS. That is when they changed their tactic,” Tsui said.
The RCMP found Sun and made an appointment in early 2017 to meet him at the University of B.C. detachment, the closest to where he was living.
“He had called them, and I’m gonna be very blunt here, he told them to fuck off, I’m not meeting with you or the MPS investigators,” Tsui said. “He made it quite clear he was living in Canada and that they couldn’t touch him there.”
Tsui said the RCMP went back to MPS in February or March of 2017 and advised them the file would be concluded.
But the RCMP learned that Sun may be negotiating for a new passport, “so that they would be working with Mr. Sun directly to see if they could negotiate something for his return.”
The investigation of Majcher, led by the RCMP’s Quebec division and Integrated National Security Enforcement Team, began in September 2021 when Majcher was living in Hong Kong, where he co-founded EMIDR Ltd. (which stands for Evaluate Monitor Investigate Deter Recover). The corporate risk advisory firm is focused on asset recovery and cybersecurity and helping governments to tackle financial crime, money laundering and tax evasion.
In a pretrial ruling, Devlin said the RCMP violated Majcher’s constitutional rights with a warrantless arrest at Vancouver International Airport in July 2023.
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