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Excerpt from fortune.com
A Canadian national who lives in China pleaded guilty on Thursday to conspiring to sell secrets he stole from Tesla to market battery assembly technology vital to electric vehicles, authorities say. He was caught in a sting operation after undercover agents posed as Long Island businesspeople looking to buy an assembly line at a trade show in Las Vegas.
Klaus Pflugbeil, 58, is now facing a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and he’ll be sentenced in October. His co-defendant, Yilong Shao, is still at large. Prosecutors said Pflugbeil and Shao were employees of a Canada-based manufacturing company that made and sold battery assembly lines for clients that needed alkaline and lithium-ion batteries. The Canada manufacturing firm was purchased by a company—identified in reports as Tesla—which gave the Elon Musk-led electric vehicle maker a leg up in continuous motion battery manufacturing.
“Despite Pflugbeil’s agreement to protect what he knew was proprietary, sensitive technology, he chose to abscond with these trade secrets to China, where he sought an unfair and illegal advantage in critical industries such as electric vehicle manufacturing,” assistant attorney general Matthew Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division said in a statement. The conduct jeopardized national security, said Olsen.
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