A former engineer and a Chinese businessman have been charged with economic espionage and conspiring to steal trade secrets from General Electric Co to benefit China, according to an indictment unsealed by the U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday.
The indictment against the former GE engineer, Xiaoqing Zheng, and Chinese businessman Zhaoxi Zhang, comes after Zheng was initially charged in August in connection with the alleged theft. It marks the first time the U.S. government has formally said the scheme was carried out to benefit China and that the Chinese government provided “financial and other support.”
According to the indictment, Zheng stole the proprietary data on GE’s turbine technology by encrypting the files on his computer and secretly embedding them into a digital photograph of sunset before emailing the photograph to his personal email.
