No reason to believe Canadian detained in Macau tied to China row: Freeland

FILE: Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Canada at the Conference on Disarmament, Palais des Nations. (Photo by Violaine Martin via UN Geneva/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

OTTAWA — Canada’s foreign-affairs minister says the federal government is trying to get consular access to a Canadian man arrested in Macau over the weekend on fraud allegations.

Chrystia Freeland says the government has no reason to believe that the 61-year-old’s arrest is linked with the cases of two other men detained in China in apparent retaliation for Canada’s arrest of a top Huawei Technologies executive.

The South China Morning Post, citing local media, said the Canadian is accused of trying to defraud an unnamed entertainment company of $375 million.

The newspaper says the man, whose full name is not given, allegedly tried to use fake papers to transfer the money from the company’s account to an account in Hong Kong.

Macau’s Judiciary Police say in a statement online that officials arrested the man as he was about to leave the gambling hub.

Police say he is charged with falsifying documents and attempted fraud.

The latest arrest comes in the midst of testy diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, have been detained in China since December for allegedly endangering national security.

Their arrests came shortly after Canadian authorities in Vancouver arrested Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive with Chinese firm Huawei Technologies, who is wanted by the U.S. on fraud charges.

On Saturday, it was announced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had fired John McCallum as Canada’s ambassador to China after he twice weighed in on the high-stakes extradition case.

Another Canadian, Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, received a death sentence for a previous drug-smuggling conviction, a harsher penalty than the 15 years of imprisonment he’d already been given.