The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted four Taiwanese in the high-tech sector for allegedly recruiting Taiwanese to work for Chinese companies.
The suspects have been charged with contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (台灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), which prohibits third parties from aiding Chinese companies in recruiting Taiwanese without prior approval.
Chen Yu-shu (陳郁樹), manager of Chinese company X-EPIC Corp’s (芯華章科技) Taiwan-based research and development center, is accused of recruiting six Taiwanese developers, whose work was transmitted to X-EPIC’s servers in China.
Photo: Chien Li-chung, Taipei Times
Inner Career Co (心職涯國際) manager Tsai Chih-wei (蔡志偉), who is also Talent Spot (Taiwan) Co’s (力德信息科技) affairs manager, had signed a contract to work as an on-site consultant at X-EPIC to facilitate the hiring of X-EPIC employees through Talent Spot, the office said.
In a separate case, Taiwan-based Cobrasonic Software Inc (庫柏資訊) in 2015 allegedly recruited Taiwanese staff to help China’s state-owned Fujian Electronics and Information Co Ltd (福建電子信息) acquire server code for IBM’s Informix system and develop database server software in China, prosecutors said.
Fujian Electronics vice president Lu Wensheng (盧文勝) and Su Chi-shuo (蘇其碩), a manager for Chinese-funded Feig Science and Technology Development (Taiwan) Co Ltd (台灣菲格科技), worked with former Informix Taiwan regional head Benson Lin (林俊仁), whose Cobrasonic is a vendor for IBM products, and former Asia-Pacific region consultant Lin Yin-feng (林蔭峰) to license the code, which was given to Fujian Electronics’ subsidiary Sinoregal, the prosecutors’ office said.
Sinoregal’s staff were entirely provided by Cobrasonic, while Lin Yin-feng also hired staff to work for Sinoregal at an office leased by Feig, which is in turn a subsidiary of Sinoregal, it said.
As Feig is a Chinese-funded company, it is prohibited from recruiting developers without approval from the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
However, it found a loophole enabling it to hire engineers through Cobrasnic by offering 10 days of special leave and wages “far exceeding those mandated by the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法),” prosecutors said.
Ultimately, a Taiwan-based team modified the Informix code before uploading it to a server in China, where Sinoregal licensed it to local clients, the prosecutors’ office said.
The Taiwan team was kept on to provide remote technical services for Chinese customers, it said.
Cobrasonic is one of the few companies in Taiwan capable of in-house research and development for certain software, and focuses on information security, but it abused its status by recruiting personnel for a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned company, it said.
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