Ex-envoy’s meet over Gui’s release possibly illegal

STOCKHOLM: Sweden’s former ambassador to Beijing may have committed a crime when she organised negotiations, unknown to the foreign ministry, aimed at securing the release of detained ChineseSwedish publisher Gui Minhai, a prosecutor said.

Sweden’s ambassador to Beijing from 2016 to early 2019, Anna Lindstedt is suspected of having overstepped her authority when she set up a meeting in Stockholm in late January between the publisher’s daughter and businessmen claiming to have connections to the Chinese Communist Party.

Gui Minhai, a Chinese-born Swedish citizen known for publishing gossipy titles about Chinese political leaders out of a Hong Kong book shop, disappeared while vacationing in Thailand in 2015 before resurfacing in mainland China.

Prosecutor Hans Ihrman told Swedish public radio Sveriges Radio that Lindstedt was under formal investigation of a crime.

Ihrman said on Thursday that she was suspected of “arbitrary conduct when negotiating with a foreign power”, meaning someone acting outside their mandate.

The Swedish foreign ministry has said it knew nothing about the meeting nor that the ambassador was even in Stockholm at the time.

Gui Minhai disappeared from a vacation home in Thailand in 2015.

Several months later he appeared on Chinese state television confessing to a fatal drunk driving accident from more than a decade earlier.