A Chinese national was sentenced this Thursday by the American justice system to two years in prison for having stolen industrial secrets from his former employer, a company in the oil sector. Tan Hongjin, 36, will also have to pay more than 135,000 euros in compensation to the company, the justice ministry said.
Installed for 13 years in the United States and holding a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology, he was recruited in June 2017 by an Oklahoma oil company and assigned to a research unit on new generation batteries.
Chinese scientist Hongjin Tan gets two-year prison sentence for stealing trade secrets from US energy company https://t.co/DZJ9f5AKES
- Brian Moore (@thebrmoore) February 27, 2020Hundreds of downloaded files
In December 2018, Tan Hongjin had illegally downloaded hundreds of files related to the manufacture of a product worth more than a billion dollars. He then submitted his resignation. His suspicious employer had seized the police, who had found the data on a hard drive, at his home. Arrested in December 2018, he pleaded guilty in November 2019 to “theft of trade secrets”.
The victim was not identified, but a LinkedIn page cites the materials scientist working for the Phillips 66 energy group research center in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Washington regularly accuses Beijing of seeking to assert itself as the world's leading economic power by stealing its trade secrets. Some 90% of economic spy files investigated between 2011 and 2018, and two-thirds of the thefts of trade secrets, involved Beijing, according to the US government.
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