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Swedish ambassador acquitted in China influence case

by editor

STOCKHOLM — Swedish ambassadors around the world can breathe a sigh of relief.

In a hotly anticipated verdict, a Stockholm court ruled on Friday that the country’s former ambassador to China, Anna Lindstedt, did not commit a crime when she arranged a meeting last year between two businessmen with links to China and the daughter of jailed Swedish publisher Gui Minhai.

The daughter, Angela Gui, later said that during the meeting she had come under pressure to cease campaigning for her father’s release, possibly in exchange for a job offer.

The prosecution alleged Lindstedt had overstepped her authority in calling the meeting, which took place in the luxury Sheraton Hotel in Stockholm. She was the first diplomat in more than two centuries to face criminal charges of “arbitrariness in negotiations with a foreign power” — with officials alleging that Lindstedt had damaged Swedish relations with China.

At a press conference at Stockholm District Court on Friday, the judge in the case, Anna Flodin, said the court had ruled that Lindstedt’s actions fell within the remit of her job and she had not broken the law.

“We have found that an ambassador has broad authority to represent his or her country in relation to the country where he or she is ambassador,” Flodin told POLITICO.

The case is the latest twist in a story of rapidly deteriorating diplomatic relations between Sweden and China over the detention of Gui, who has been held in China since 2015 and was jailed for 10 years on spying charges in February this year.

Experts say his real crime in the eyes of Chinese authorities was publishing books critical of Chinese leaders through a company he ran in Hong Kong.

The case, which was heard in June, has been closely watched in Sweden and its twists and turns have transfixed and bemused locals in equal measure.

Interviews given by foreign ministry officials to police ahead of the court hearing lifted the curtain slightly on the otherwise closed world of international diplomacy.

Job offer

The meeting, in January 2019, brought together Chinese businessman Kevin Liu and his associate John Meewella on one side and Angela Gui on the other.

Readouts of interviews with Lindstedt, Angela Gui and Meewella by police show that a key agenda item was a job offer Liu planned to make to Angela Gui. Also hanging in the air was a vaguely articulated commitment from Liu to use influence he claimed to have with Chinese officials to help secure the release of her father.

The meeting quickly unravelled, though.

The discussions of a job offer initially went quite well. But things got heated when, according to Angela Gui, Meewella began to make a number of demands of her, including that she cease her public campaign for her father’s release, which — among other things — has involved her speaking before a U.S congressional committee.

The meeting ended with an upset Angela Gui declining the job offer. She said she later contacted officials at the foreign ministry in Stockholm to raise concerns about the meeting, only to be told that it had not been sanctioned by anyone other than Lindstedt. Officials at the foreign ministry quickly raised the alarm with Swedish police, fearing some kind of breach of security.

The former ambassador denied wrongdoing throughout the case, arguing that she had been merely facilitating discussions as part of her job as a diplomat. During the hearing in June, she called the case “unreal and Kafkaesque.”

Following the verdict on Friday, she told local media was “happy and relieved” and would now “try to get back to a normal life.”  Lindstedt’s lawyer Conny Cedermark called the verdict “wise and expected” while public prosecutor Henrik Olin said he would read the judgment more closely before deciding whether an eventual appeal was warranted.

Friday’s verdict showed the court found that the prosecution had failed to prove the case against Lindstedt, including the assertion that Liu and Meewella actually represented the Chinese state.

Judge Flodin said the hardest part of the case had been trying to apply a law which hadn’t been used since 1794.

“We have really had to dig into what the legal texts actually say, with their outdated phrases and so on,” she said. “We have really had to dig into the past.”

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