Chinese prosecutors have indicted four executives of Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto.
The No. 1 branch of the Shanghai People’s Procuratorate charged the executives Wednesday with bribery and infringing on trade secrets. All four were arrested last year on suspicion of industrial espionage, but no spying charges were brought Wednesday. The executives, led by Australian citizen Stern Hu, were held without being formally charged since July, as Chinese authorities completed their investigation.
Citing court statements, the official Xinhua news agency said prosecutors claim the executives took “advantage of their position to seek profit for others, and asking for, or illegally accepting, huge amounts of money from Chinese steel enterprises.” As such, Xinhua reported, the executives allegedly “lured the Chinese enterprises’ heads with promises, or through other illegal means, to obtain the steel companies’ commercial secrets on multiple occasions, causing “extremely serious consequence[s]” for the companies.”
Rio Tinto is one of China's largest suppliers of iron ore. The basis of the case is the suspicion that the company may have resorted to bribery and acquisition of trade secrets to inflate by billions of dollars the price of ore sold to Chinese companies, many of which are state-owned.
The arrests and the suspected political motivations behind them have caused widespread concern among Western businesses operating in China, “raising fears that other executives could be accused of bribery or arrested because of commercial disputes with Chinese companies,” The New York Times reports.
