Four people have been convicted of poaching high-tech talent in Taiwan for China, a Hsinchu District Court ruling said.
Taiwanese Chang Po-chien (張柏堅), Chan Yi-kuan (詹益寬), Hsu Han-jen (許瀚仁) and Wang Ching-hsin (王景新) contravined the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) and need to pay NT$450,000 to the state, the ruling said.
The four also received prison sentences ranging from four to six months, but the court delayed the sentence for two years, it said.
Photo: Tsai Chang-sheng, Taipei Times
The ruling said the four knowingly contravened the law by establishing wholly owned subsidiaries of Goke Microelectronics Co and Ruikuan Intelligent Company in Taiwan without approval.
Chang served as Goke Microelectronics Co Taiwan’s branch CEO, while Chan was Ruikuan Intelligent Technology CEO, Hsu was a Ruikuan director and Wang was senior coding engineer at Ruikuan, it said.
The act prohibits third parties from aiding Chinese companies in recruiting Taiwanese without prior approval or the establishment of Chinese subsidiary companies in Taiwan.
Goke Microelectronics Co was founded with about 400 million yuan (US$5.5 million) in funding from the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, which is managed by the Chinese ministries of industry and information technology, and finance, the ruling said.
Chang instructed Chan to solicit the services of accountants — who were kept in the dark regarding the company’s illegal status — to establish Ruikuan in 2017, a submission the Taipei City Government approved, the ruling said.
Chang rented buildings in Taipei and Hsinchu as his company’s operational base and put out recruitment notices for professionals knowledgeable in the manufacturing of solid-state drives and next-generation NAND flash memory chip technologies, it said.
Some people were only hired after obtaining approval from Goke Microelectronics Co, and research and development progress conducted by Ruikuan was regularly reported to Goke and its subsidiary company Xitcorp as well as its branch offices in China’s Sichuan and Jiangsu provinces, the ruling said.
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