Advertisement

Ex-Monsanto employee pleads guilty to corporate spying for China

Xiang Haitao, a former Monsanto employee, pleaded guilty Thursday to stealing trade secrets for China. Photo by Bill Greenblatt/UPI
Xiang Haitao, a former Monsanto employee, pleaded guilty Thursday to stealing trade secrets for China. Photo by Bill Greenblatt/UPI | License Photo

Jan. 6 (UPI) -- A former Monsanto employee pleaded guilty to espionage charges Thursday for stealing trade secrets from the U.S. agriculture behemoth for the benefit of China, prosecutors said.

Xiang Haitao, 44, a Chinese national who resided in Chesterfield, Mo., worked as an imaging scientist for Monsanto and its subsidiary The Climate Corporation from 2008, and was arrested a day after leaving his company in June of 2017 while awaiting to board a flight to China in possession of a one-way ticket and electronic devices.

Advertisement

A search of the devices found that they contained copies of a proprietary predictive algorithm called Nutrient Optimizer that Monsanto, which was bought by Bayer in 2018, considered a critical component to a platform that farmers used to collect, store and visualize critical agricultural field data and increase and improve farm productivity.

Prosecutors formally indicted Xiang on one count of conspiracy to commit economic espionage, three counts of economic espionage, one count of conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets and three counts of theft of trade secrets in November of 2019.

On Thursday, he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit economic espionage and is scheduled to be sentenced on April 7 when he faces up to 15 years in prison and a potential $5 million fine as well as a maximum three years of supervised release.

Advertisement

The Justice Department has said that Xiang had applied for and was ultimately recruited into a Chinese government program that seeks to enlist Chinese academics and scientists working abroad to illegally transfer technology and intellectual property to Beijing.

"The indictment alleges another example of the Chinese government using Talent Plans to encourage employees to steal intellectual property from their U.S. Employers," then-Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers said in a statement when the charges against Xiang were first announced.

"Xiang prompted himself to the Chinese government based on his experience at Monsanto," he said. "Within a year of being selected as a Talent Plan recruit, he quit his job, bought a one-way ticket to China and was caught at the airport with a copy of the company's proprietary algorithm before he could spirit it away."

In 2018, the Justice Department started the China Initiative, a program to target economic espionage for the benefit of China as 80% of all economic espionage prosecutions brought by federal prosecutors concern cases of Beijing spying.

Since then, federal prosecutors have produced dozens of such cases.

"Mr. Xiang used his insider status at a major international company to steal valuable trade secrets for use in his native China," U.S. Attorney Sayler Fleming for the Eastern District of Missouri said in a statement Thursday. "We cannot allow U.S. citizens or foreign nationals to hand sensitive business information over to competitors in other countries, and we will continue our vigorous criminal enforcement of economic espionage and trade secret laws."

Advertisement

"These crimes present a danger to the U.S. economy and jeopardize our nation's leadership in innovation and our national security," he said.

Latest Headlines