A court in China sentenced a Canadian businessman, Michael Spavor, to 11 years in prison after declaring him guilty of spying on Wednesday, deepening a split with Canada, which has condemned the case as political hostage-taking.

Spavor has the right to appeal the judgment, but Chinese courts rarely overturn criminal judgments, and his fate could rest on deal-making among Beijing, Ottawa and Washington.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, in a statement, denounced Spavor’s sentence as “absolutely unacceptable and unjust”.

In a brief online statement, the court in Dandong, a northeast Chinese city next to North Korea where Spavor had often done business, also said that he would be deported, but gave no details about the timing. The court said it had found Spavor guilty of obtaining state secrets and providing them to a foreign recipient, but offered no details.

The sentencing suggests that a court in Beijing is likely to announce a similar guilty judgment soon in a parallel spying case against another Canadian, Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat arrested about the same time as Spavor, in late 2018. The detentions occurred less than two weeks after the police in Vancouver detained a Chinese telecom executive, Meng Wanzhou, at the request of American prosecutors.

Meng remains on bail in Vancouver and has been fighting extradition to the US, where she faces fraud charges linked to her role as the chief financial officer of the Chinese tech giant Huawei. Spavor’s conviction came amid closing arguments at the Supreme Court of British Columbia over whether Meng can be extradited. The detentions of the two Michaels and Meng have opened a rancorous rift between Beijing and Ottawa.

In commenting on Spavor’s sentencing,Trudeau criticised the legal process that had ensnared the Canadians.

“The verdict for Spavor comes after more than two and a half years of arbitrary detention, a lack of transparency in the legal process, and a trial that did not satisfy even the minimum standards required by international law,” he said.

New York Times News Service