BURST
Days before the start of William Majcher’s trial on charges of helping the Chinese government on Canadian soil, a B.C. Supreme Court judge has ruled the arrest of the retired high-ranking RCMP officer was premature and illegal.
The trial begins Monday and will test the prosecutor’s theory that the retired RCMP inspector is guilty of one count of “preparatory acts” to commit an offence under the Security of Information Act.
The government alleges that in 2017, Majcher worked for, or with, the People’s Republic of China prepared to threaten Hongwei (Kevin) Sun, a B.C. resident, to try to persuade him to return to China with his assets, as part of China’s global anti-corruptions operations, according to the pretrial ruling by Justice Martha Devlin.
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 Charter ruling was among four pretrial judgments made public on Friday after several days of hearings in March. Devlin ruled the prosecutor could use some FBI evidence, but could not use some other evidence. She also ruled an expert witness for the prosecution would not be allowed to testify.
Majcher, who specialized in undercover operations and economic crime, retired from the RCMP in Vancouver in 2007 and then founded a company in Hong Kong that did asset recovery work. He talked about it openly, Devlin wrote.
The RCMP had been investigating for almost two years before he was arrested at Vancouver airport in July 2023.
An officer testified 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.
The officer said he determined that Majcher should be arrested for conspiring to commit offences under the Security of Information Act that prohibited foreign-influenced threats or violence.
Majcher’s position is the officer’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.
But she said the parties didn’t discuss what that would mean for the trial, including whether any searches of Majcher after his arrest also contravened the Charter, and she reserved “any declaration to that effect until the parties address the matter.”
She also ruled that a warranted search of the home office of Kenneth (Kim) Marsh, a B.C.-based private investigator and former commander of an RCMP international organized crime unit, who communicated with Majcher about Sun, shouldn’t have happened.
Majcher said on Friday that he had no immediate comment but looks forward to the trial.
His lawyer, Ian Donaldson, said he expected the case to go ahead as scheduled on Monday.