China national gets 2 year sentence for theft of trade secrets worth $1Bln : Justice dept.
Washington/Sputnik/UNI: A Chinese national who formerly worked for a US oil company received a two-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to stealing proprietary information from his employer valued at more than $1 billion, the Justice Department said in a press release on Thursday.
"From June 2017 until December 2018, [Hongjin] Tan was employed as an associate scientist at the petroleum company and was assigned to work in a group with the goal of developing next generation battery technologies for stationary energy storage," the release said. "In his plea agreement, Tan admitted to intentionally copying and downloading the technologies’ research and development materials without authorization from his employer."
Tan used a thumb drive to copy hundreds of files containing the proprietary information before resigning on December 12, 2018. Later in the day, he returned the thumb drive to the company, minus five deleted files, copies of which the FBI discovered on his home computer, the release added.
The Justice Department valued the stolen material at more than $1 billion.
US District Judge Gregory Frizzell sentenced the Chinese national and permanent US resident to 24 months in federal prison and ordered the defendant to pay $150,000 in restitution to his former employer, according to the release.
The release gave no indication that Tan provided the stolen information to anyone in China.
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