OTTAWA—Canada’s stunning arrest of a top executive of China’s telecom giant Huawei on a U.S. extradition request rippled through stock markets and around the world Thursday, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saying he had nothing to do with the decision by Canadian justice officials.The arrest on Saturday of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and daughter of the company’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, was made by “the appropriate authorities,” Trudeau said.In Montreal, the prime minister told reporters he was given “a few days’ notice that this was in the works.” Trudeau was in Argentina last week at the G20 summit, after which U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met Saturday — the day of Meng’s arrest — and announced a temporary truce in a tariff war that has prompted fears of a global recession. Stock markets that had plunged amid uncertainty over the supposed truce fell again at news of Meng’s arrest, before staging a comeback by the end of Thursday. Trudeau insisted that no one at the political level in his government was involved in the decision to approve the Chinese business executive’s arrest, and that he had no “direct or indirect conversations with any of my international counterparts on this.” In French he confirmed he had not spoken to President Xi.“I can assure everyone we are a country of an independent judiciary and the appropriate authorities took the decisions in this case without any political involvement or interference,” said Trudeau.Read more:What we know and don’t know about the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng WanzhouHuawei arrest fuels anxiety over the security of Canada’s 5G dealingsHuawei CFO arrested in Vancouver for possible extradition to the U.S.The RCMP executed a provisional warrant issued by Canada’s Justice Department at the request of the FBI, a Canadian police source said.I ...
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