Chinese man sentenced to jail in US for stealing Monsanto trade secret
- Haitao Xiang was ordered to serve 29 months in prison and fined US$150,000 for attempting to bring proprietary farming software back to China on a memory card
- The case is part of the now-defunct ‘China Initiative’, intended to crack down on trade secret theft and economic espionage
A Chinese national who pleaded guilty earlier this year to stealing a trade secret from agribusiness giant Monsanto while he worked in Missouri has been sentenced to more than two years in prison.
Haitao Xiang, formerly of Chesterfield, Missouri, was sentenced Thursday in federal court in St Louis to 29 months in prison and fined US$150,000. Xiang also must undergo three years of supervision upon his release from prison.
In January, Xiang pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit economic espionage. Federal prosecutors said Xiang transferred a trade secret to a memory card and then attempted to take it to China for the benefit of the Chinese government.
Xiang worked as an imaging scientist for Monsanto and one of its subsidiaries, The Climate Corporation, from 2008 to 2017.
Court records say Monsanto and The Climate Corporation developed a digital online farming software platform to help farmers collect field data to increase productivity. Part of the platform was an algorithm called the Nutrient Optimiser, which the companies considered a trade secret and their intellectual property.