BURST
A former high-ranking RCMP officer pleaded not guilty on Monday at the opening of his trial on a charge that he violated Canadian security law by preparing to help a foreign government repatriate a former Chinese national and his assets to China.
William (Bill) Majcher, who had reached the rank of inspector when he retired, is alleged, while working for or with the People’s Republic of China, to have prepared to threaten Hongwei (Kevin) Sun, a permanent resident of Canada living in B.C.
Sun was wanted in China for financial crimes amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars and was accused of investing heavily in Vancouver real estate.
The prosecution contends that Majcher tried to persuade Sun to return to China with his assets as part of China’s global anti-corruption operations, according to court documents.
During cross-examination of the prosecution’s first witness on Monday, court heard that RCMP investigators in 2022 suggested Majcher, who worked as a private investigator based in Hong Kong and is married to an Asian woman, moved to China because he had “yellow fever.”
The term wasn’t fully defined during cross-examination by Majcher’s lawyer, but it’s a derogatory term typically used to describe a white man’s fetishization of Asian women.
The term was used by Cpl. Chady Khoury, who interviewed former Mountie Peter German in 2022 as part of the RCMP investigation of Majcher, Justice Martha Devlin heard on Day 1 of the 15-day trial in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver.
German, who had retired as an RCMP deputy commissioner, was asked to testify at the trial about his last meeting with Majcher, who had worked under him and with whom he had a long, but not close, relationship.
German had assigned Majcher to lead B.C.’s market enforcement team, created years ago when Canada took action to step up enforcement against financial market fraud, he said.
Majcher had the necessary credentials because he had worked in London before joining the RCMP and had experience working on financial investigations and undercover operations, German testified.
“He was strong in that area and that wasn’t common in the RCMP and he would stand out,” he said.
German said he last spoke with Majcher in January 2019, when they had a FaceTime call, the first time they talked in years, which was “casual” and during which Majcher mostly updated him on his personal life.
Both were retired then and they discussed mutual interests, such as money laundering and financial crime. German, who wrote two reports on money laundering in B.C., said Majcher brought up the topic of asset recovery.
During cross-examination by Majcher’s lawyer, Tanya Chamberlain, German said he was asked to speculate about why Majcher would want to live in Hong Kong.
“I recall that his spouse was Asian and they were living in Hong Kong,” German said.
Reading from the police interview transcript from the 2022 interview, Chamberlain said Khoury said to him: “I know he (Majcher) has a little bit of what I call the yellow fever, but why would he go there and, like, him being around someone being involved in the financial markets.”
“What did you take that he meant from (that)?” she asked German.
“Well, it’s a very inappropriate reference to someone of Asian extraction, Asian descent,” said German.
Chamberlain also asked German about his comment during the 2022 interview, that Majcher was prone to exaggeration or hyperbole.
“I think hyperbole would be better,” said German. “I would go with hyperbole over exaggeration.”
“Do you recall saying about Majcher’s statements: ‘You never really know how much is a bit inflated, how much is true.”
German repeated that Majcher is “very good at doing undercover work,” but, referring to some of his statements in past, he said he would wonder “how much of this is inflated.”
“Not in the sense of lying or anything like that,” but what he’d say, “it’s a bit inflated,” he said.
He also called him a “gregarious, outgoing individual,” who would work the room at a party and know everybody.
In court documents released last week, Devlin delivered her judgments on several pretrial motions.
The RCMP had been investigating for almost two years before Majcher was arrested at Vancouver airport in July 2023.
An officer testified at a pretrial hearing that the RCMP investigation found Majcher had conspired with the Chinese government and others to assist it to repatriate former residents and their assets. He said Majcher was valuable because of his extensive network of contacts and because he was intelligent and knowledgeable.
Majcher’s position is the RCMP’s entire case is “nothing more than suspicion, speculation, hypotheses and guesswork” about his activities and they don’t amount to the “credibly based probability of criminal conduct required for a lawful warrantless arrest.”
Devlin concluded the arrest by Quebec RCMP, which was in charge of the investigation, was unlawful because it violated Section 9 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protects Canadians against illegal arrest and detention.
The arrest was “premature” as police hadn’t collected “sufficient credible and compelling information” to allow the RCMP to believe in the “probability, rather than simply the possibility, that Mr. Majcher had conspired to commit offences” under the Security of Information Act, she wrote.