Federal prosecutors in New York have boosted charges against an ex-IBM Corp. software developer, charging him with economic espionage.
It’s the latest in a series of disputes over trade secrets between the U.S. and China.
Prosecutors now say Xu Jiaqiang stole computer code to benefit the National Health and Planning Commission of the People’s Republic of China. The new allegations were contained in a rewritten indictment announced Tuesday.
The source code is “a product of decades of work,” the BBC reported. It is a clustered file system, which the BBC described as boosting a computer’s performance “by coordinating work among multiple servers.”
Xu was first arrested last December in White Plains on a theft-of-trade-secrets charge and pleaded not guilty. He will be arraigned Thursday on the new charges.
IBM has declined to comment on the case.
IBM’s website still shows a Xu Jiaqiang still listed as a developer., the BBC noted.
The indictment accuses Xu of stealing and converting the company’s source code for a piece of proprietary software for his own use. It says he then planned to use it to help the Chinese agency between November 2014 and last December.
Read more from the BBC at:
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36535577
