Chinese authorities have blocked Canadian government representatives from attending the trial of Chinese-Canadian billionaire Xiao Jianhua (肖建華), the Canadian embassy said yesterday.
Xiao, who went missing in Hong Kong five years ago, was due to go on trial in China on Monday, and Canadian consular officials had been pressing for consular access, the embassy said earlier in a statement.
“Canada made several requests to attend the trial proceedings,” Nadia Scipio del Campo, public diplomacy counselor at the embassy, said in an e-mailed statement. “Our attendance was denied by Chinese authorities.”
Photo: AFP / the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)
When asked for details, such as to confirm the location of the trial, the embassy said it would not comment further due to privacy considerations.
Asked about Xiao’s trial at a media briefing on Monday, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian (趙立堅) said he was not aware of the situation.
China-born Xiao, who is known to have links to Chinese Communist Party elite, has not been seen in public since 2017 after he was investigated amid a state-led crackdown on conglomerates.
Officials have not disclosed the specifics of the investigation.
Xiao was taken from a Hong Kong hotel in a wheelchair with his head covered in the early hours of the day he went missing, a source close to him said at the time.
Xiao was ranked 32nd on the 2016 Hurun China rich list, China’s equivalent of the Forbes list, with an estimated net worth of US$5.97 billion at the time.
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