Ex-Mountie's lawyer calls Crown case circumstantial, urges judge to find Bill Majcher not guilty.
Judge schedules May 13 for oral verdict in foreign interference case.
The judge in the trial of a former RCMP inspector suspected of being an agent for China said she would provide an oral verdict on May 13.
Justice Martha Devlin set the date after the end of closing arguments on April 27 in B.C. Supreme Court, where Bill Majcher’s lawyer said his client should be acquitted of a charge under the Security of Information Act.
Majcher is accused of preparing to induce a permanent resident of Canada, Sun Commercial real estate mogul Hongwei “Kevin” Sun,” to submit to the demands of China. The Chinese government believed Sun took more than $100 million with him to Metro Vancouver after allegedly bilking 2.9 billion renminbi (CAD$579.5 million) out of state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.
Majcher’s lawyer Ian Donaldson called the Crown case “circumstantial.”
Prone to hyperbole
The Crown relied on a January 2019 FaceTime call between Majcher and former RCMP colleague Peter German as evidence that Majcher achieved his 2017 goal of working with China’s Ministry of Public Security and Public Security Bureau to assist in the recovery of proceeds of crime that had fled overseas.
“Mr. German’s evidence about the kind of person Mr. Majcher was: gregarious, prone to hyperbole,” Donaldson said. “You never really know how much is a bit inflated and maybe how much is true.”
The trial began April 20 when Majcher pleaded not guilty, but the proceedings were already under a cloud. In March, Devlin ruled that the RCMP violated Majcher’s constitutional rights with a warrantless arrest at Vancouver International Airport in July 2023.
The Crown closed its case early on April 22. The defence did not present any evidence and Majcher chose not to testify.
Knocks Crown theory
In the early 2000s, German and Majcher worked in the RCMP’s integrated market enforcement teams, the squad tasked with investigating capital markets fraud. German eventually became the head of the RCMP in Western and Northern Canada. After he retired, German investigated money laundering in B.C. with two reports commissioned by then-Attorney General David Eby in 2018 and 2019.
“If the Crown theory is that the accused, Mr. Majcher is somehow confessing to [German], the author of Dirty Money and Dirty Money Volume Two, his old friend who clearly has interest after his career in policing, which are similar to the things that Mr. Majcher’s business does,” Donaldson said. “There’s no suggestion of unlawfulness or coercive behaviour or anything else. There is, I agree, Mr. Majcher’s words that his company and entities associated to these Chinese agencies are dealing with recovery of proceeds of crime.”