Taiwan arrests six current and former BASF SE engineers accused of leaking technology to China, according to an article from Bloomberg. The engineers are suspected of accepting bribes and sharing BASF technology with China’s Jiangyin Jianghua Microelectronics Materials Company.
According to the article, Jianghua offered direct payment in excess of $5 million in exchange for the proprietary technology, an unusually large sum even as American and Taiwanese have long accused China of intellectual property theft and appropriating trade secrets by poaching talent. Only one of the six accused was a current BASF employee. The company’s losses from the alleged theft reportedly could top out at 100 million euros ($114 million) per year.
Read the entire article here.