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(Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors expanded a criminal case over the alleged theft of industrial secrets from chemical giant DuPont, securing an indictment against a Chinese company on economic espionage-related charges.
A Northern California grand jury indicted Pangang Group for conspiracy to commit economic espionage and other charges including conspiracy to steal trade secrets, according to court documents unsealed on Wednesday.
Pangang, a state-owned steel manufacturer in Sichuan province, allegedly worked with a California businessman and others to obtain several valuable trade secrets from DuPont, the indictment says.
Separately, a former engineer for Motorola Inc was found guilty on Wednesday of stealing trade secrets from the company but cleared of economic espionage for China.
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The latest developments in the two cases come as Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping is scheduled to visit the United States next week on a range of economic, trade, regional and global issues.
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Xi, considered China's president-in-waiting, will meet President Barack Obama at the White House next Tuesday. The U.S. visit will be a major step in signaling Xi's readiness to take over as China's next top leader and run Beijing's complex and sometimes vexed relationship with Washington.
The United States has identified industrial spying as a significant and growing threat to the nation's prosperity. In a government report released last November, authorities cited China as "the world's most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage."
California businessman Walter Liew has already been in custody for several months on witness tampering charges related to the DuPont allegations. Liew and his wife, Christina, also face charges of conspiracy to commit economic espionage and other counts in the latest indictment.
Lawyers for Walter and Christina Liew could not be reached for comment. Tom Nolan, a lawyer for Walter Liew, has previously maintained that his client only possessed publicly available information, not trade secrets from DuPont.
The Pangang Group, named in the Dupont case, is based in Panzhihua city in the far south of China's Sichuan province and is western China's largest steelmaker. It was formally known as Panzhihua Iron and Steel (Group) Co Ltd.
Three of Pangang's subsidiaries are also named in the indictment, along with a Chinese citizen who worked for that company.
In 2010 authorities Pangang's merger with Angang Steel Co Ltd, which would make Angang the country's largest steel mill.
Phone calls to Pangang's headquarters on Thursday went unanswered, and company officials did not respond to faxed queries.
Liew, a U.S. citizen, allegedly paid former DuPont engineers for assistance in designing chloride-route titanium dioxide, also known as TiO2, according to the indictment. DuPont is the world's largest producer of the white pigment used to make a range of white-tinted products, including paper, paint and plastics.
