Chinese firm fined for theft of secrets

A US court on Friday imposed the maximum fine of $1.5m on Chinese company Sinovel for stealing trade secrets from an American company producing wind turbines, the justice department said.

The decision comes on the day Washington unleashed 25% import tariffs on $34bn in Chinese products to punish the country, the world’s secondbiggest economy, for what President Donald Trump has said is the rampant theft of American technology.

After being charged in 2013, Sinovel was convicted in January by a US court of stealing the trade secrets of AMSC, a USbased company formerly known as American Superconductor, which lost $550m and 700 jobs — more than half its global workforce — as a result, the justice department said.

The two companies have now reached a settlement and Sinovel has one year to pay $25m to AMSC, after paying $32.5m earlier in July. The Chinese firm will also repay $850,000 to other victims.

“Rather than pay AMSC for more than $800m in products and services it had agreed to purchase, Sinovel instead hatched a scheme to brazenly steal AMSC’s proprietary wind turbine technology, causing the loss of almost 700 jobs and more than $1bn in shareholder equity at AMSC,” acting assistant attorney-general John Cronan said in a statement.

“As demonstrated by this prosecution, intellectual property theft poses a serious threat to American companies.”

Sinovel used the stolen technology, including software, to regulate the flow of power from turbines to electrical grids, to produce its own wind turbines and retrofit existing turbines, prosecutors said.

The company also lured away an AMSC engineer to help steal source code for the key software in 2011, the statement said.