Former RCMP officer William Majcher has been found not guilty by a B.C. Supreme Court judge of allegations that he acted on behalf of the Chinese regime in an attempt to coerce a Canadian resident into returning to China to face fraud charges.
The judge found that the Crown had failed to prove their allegations against Majcher beyond a reasonable doubt.
Majcher, 63, had been accused of acting as a “proxy” for the Chinese Communist Party as he sought to convince Canadian resident Kevin Sun to return to China to face fraud charges. Majcher has been charged under Canada’s Security of Information Act.
Justice Martha Devlin found that there was no evidence that Majcher had targeted Sun, a Vancouver real estate mogul, as the Crown had alleged, based on emails that Majcher sent to a colleague in 2017.
Majcher was arrested at Vancouver International Airport on July 18, 2023, and was charged with one count of committing “preparatory acts” to commit an offence under Canada’s Security of Information Act. He pleaded not guilty on the trial’s opening day, April 20.
In her ruling, Devlin said she couldn’t find evidence that such preparatory steps took place.
“Clearly, the language of section 22 of the (Security of Information Act) requires not only an intention to prepare to commit an offence, but also something to actually be done in preparation for the offence,” Devlin said.
Emails
Majcher had worked in international policing and financial crime investigations with the RCMP until he retired in 2007. In 2016, he founded EMIDR (Evaluate, Monitor, Investigate, Deter, Recover), a Hong Kong-based corporate risk and asset recovery firm.In a June 2017 email that became central to the Crown’s case, Majcher told associate Ross Gaffney that he had been negotiating with Chinese officials and a Vancouver lawyer regarding efforts to recover part of an alleged RMB$2.9 billion (CA$585 million) fraud committed against the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in Jilin province.
Majcher wrote that the alleged fraud suspect had become a “major real estate mogul in Vancouver” with more than $100 million in assets, and said Chinese police were preparing a global arrest warrant.
He also wrote that he hoped to obtain a copy of the warrant before it was issued so they could pressure the target into co-operating, and said he was meeting an associate of the target in Hong Kong to discuss a possible settlement. In the same email, Majcher described other proposed work with Chinese authorities, including training police in international financial crime investigations and developing overseas money-laundering sting operations targeting Chinese officials and economic criminals.
In another email, Majcher said that if the target co-operated, the matter could be settled within weeks, but if not, it could lead to an extradition request. He added that he believed the target was motivated to co-operate as it could “guarantee him his passport and no jail time.”
The Crown argued the most significant evidence against Majcher came from passages in the June 2017 emails, and the inferences that could be drawn from them.
In her decision, Justice Devlin wrote that the emails did not sufficiently prove the allegations against Majcher.
“Viewing the entirety of the evidence, and remaining alive to the context in which Mr. Majcher wrote his communications to Mr. Gaffney on June 12, 2017, I have a reasonable doubt about the nature and extent of Mr. Majcher’s actions and his subjective intention in relation to Mr. Sun as of May and June 2017. It follows that I find the Crown has failed to meet its burden in this case,” she wrote.
The trial was closely watched as one of Canada’s most high-profile foreign interference cases involving China, amid growing concern in recent years about Beijing’s activities in Canada.
During Majcher’s trial, the court was told that three Chinese police officials went “missing” for six hours while on an RCMP-escorted visit to Vancouver in 2018, raising concerns they could be involved in repatriating individuals targeted by Beijing.
