Taiwan has arrested a group of engineers from the local subsidiary of the German company BASF for allegedly stealing and transferring the company’s technology to a Chinese rival.
The Criminal Investigation Bureau, Taiwan’s equivalent of the FBI, said on Monday that Jiangyin Jianghua Microelectronics Materials had poached a group of executives formerly and currently employed by BASF in Taiwan and paid them Rmb40m ($5.8m) to transfer BASF technology. Jiangyin Jianghua is a Shanghai-listed company based in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu.
The CIB publicised the case just as US officials began negotiations in China aimed at implementing the trade war truce between presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Concerns from multinational companies about the theft of their commercial secrets in China have helped to drive the current trade tensions.