DuPont Trade Secret Theft for China Leads to Conviction

DuPont Co.’s secrets for cleanly manufacturing the ubiquitous white pigment found in paper and plastics were stolen and sold to a Chinese company by a California engineer, a jury said, handing a conviction to U.S. prosecutors cracking down on economic espionage.

Walter Liew, 56, a consultant who rose from a farm in Malaysia to earn $28 million from contracts with a Chinese company, was found guilty by federal jurors in San Francisco of 22 counts of economic espionage, trade secret theft, witness tampering and making false statements. He sold the secrets to China’s Pangang Group Co., a Chengdu-based chemical company building a 100,000 metric-ton-per-year plant to produce titanium dioxide, a white pigment with a global annual sales of $14 billion, prosecutors said.