WALTER Liew, a Chinese immigrant and naturalized American citizen, allegedly made millions by stealing Dupont’s protocols for the whitening chemical, titanium dioxide, and using them to set up chemical plants in China. Two American engineers, one of whom later committed suicide, helped him in the theft of the trade secrets, according to the FBI.

From Bloomberg Business:

Liew excelled at school and traveled overseas to earn his college degrees—a bachelor’s from Taiwan University and a master’s in electrical engineering in 1982 from the University of Oklahoma. He worked for Hewlett-Packard before starting a technology consulting firm in 1989, fulfilling a personal dream.

“Walter’s ambition really was to be more than a midlevel engineer,” Stuart Gasner, his lawyer, told jurors. “He wanted to make money. He wanted to have his own business and what that entails.” In 1991, at 34, he married a Chinese woman named Christina (it was a second marriage for both), and they became naturalized U.S. citizens before the decade was through.

The same year he married, Liew was invited to a banquet in Beijing at which government officials thanked him for being a “patriotic overseas Chinese.” According to FBI agent Kevin Phelan, who supervised the investigation of Liew, “the banquet became his calling card.” In a 2004 letter to win a titanium dioxide contract from a Chinese company, Liew described meeting at the banquet Luo Gan, then the secretary general of the state council, Beijing’s top policymaking body. Luo provided him with “directives so that I would better understand China and continue to make contributions to her,” Liew wrote.

As [Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter] Axelrod, the federal prosecutor, later put it in court: “Mr. Luo provided Mr. Liew with directives. And those directives, through Chinese agencies, included key task projects for the benefit of the Chinese government. Chief or key among those was the development of chloride-route TiO2 technology. And with Mr. Luo’s directives to Mr. Liew, so began a 20-year course of conduct of lying, cheating, and stealing.”

Liew didn’t respond to letters seeking comment, and messages left with his wife weren’t returned. [His attorney] said in a statement, “Walter Liew is a small-business man who took on an ambitious project and ran head on into two powerful forces, the DuPont Corporation and a federal government, eager to find economic espionage where China is involved.”

Liew was convicted of economic espionage and is serving a 15-year sentence in federal prison. Bloomberg lists similar cases:

1 Six Chinese nationals were indicted in 2013 on charges of conspiring to steal trade secrets from several U.S.-based seed manufacturers.

2 Five Chinese military officers were indicted in 2014 on charges of hacking the computers of U.S. companies and a trade union to obtain trade secrets. They remain at large.

3 A Chinese businessman was charged in 2014 with hacking into Boeing’s computers to steal information about U.S. military aircraft and systems.

4 A 62-year-old former employee of PPG Industries, a supplier of manufacturing materials, was charged in May 2015 with stealing the company’s secrets and passing them to a glass company in China. He killed himself a month later.

5 Six Chinese citizens, including two university professors, were charged in May 2015 with stealing sensitive mobile phone technology from two U.S. companies and sharing it with the Chinese government.

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