China Wind Tech Firm Hit with Fine for Theft of U.S. Trade Secrets

-Source-Breitbart- 6 Jul 2018670 A District judge ruled Friday Chinese turbine manufacturer Sinovel Wind Group Co. must pay $59 million in a plot to steal trade secrets from a U.S. rival. In January a federal court in Wisconsin convicted Sinovel of stealing trade secrets from AMSC and nearly putting it out of business. U.S. District Judge James Peterson ordered the Chinese company to pay $1.5 million in fines and $57.5 million in restitution at a sentencing hearing Friday in Madison Wisconsin according to the Justice Department. American Superconductor claimed it suffered at least $800 million in losses from Sinovels scheme to pilfer its technology" Bloomberg reports. Federal prosecutors accused the Chinese wind turbine maker of conspiring with an ex-AMSC employee in 2011 to swipe proprietary code from the U.S. company. Sinovel later reneged on an $800 million agreement with AMSC to purchase turbine management solutions including a software system designed to regulate electrical grid connections named Low Voltage Ride Through. The Trump administration has accused China of deploying predatory tactics in a push to overtake U.S. technological dominance. These tactics include cyber theft and requiring American companies to hand over technology in exchange for access to Chinas market. The Chinese are bad trading partners because they steal intellectual property" said Derek Scissors a China specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. in 2014 a Pennsylvania grand jury indicted five officers in the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army on charges of hacking into the computers of Westinghouse US Steel and other major American companies to steal information that would benefit their Chinese competitors.