A Chinese scientist, employed by the Hydro-Quebec electricity company, the largest in Canada and which supplies energy to the Atlantic coast of the United States, has been arrested on suspicion of spying for China, Canadian police announced Monday.
Hydro-Quebec and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced the arrest of Yuesheng Wang, 35, on charges of fraud to obtain trade secrets and other national security crimes, allegedly committed between February 2018 and October 2022.
The Canadian company, one of the world’s largest hydroelectric generators, said in a statement that Wang was a scientist whose work focused on battery materials.
“He did not have access to information related to the central mission of Hydro-Quebec,” said the company, which alerted the Mounted Police in August of the alleged criminal activities of its employee.
The RCMP said Wang published academic articles in scientific journals without permission from Hydro-Quebec, the company he had worked for since 2016.
Canadian media reported that Wang has a master’s degree in materials engineering from the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and that, before working for Hydro-Quebec, the scientist studied at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Arkansas ( USA) . ).
This announcement comes at a time when Canada has intensified its complaints about Chinese “interference” in the country.
Last week, Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly accused China of being an “increasingly disruptive global power” with values increasingly different from those of Western democracies and warned Canadian companies of the risk of cooperate with asian country.
Joly also revealed that Canada will launch an action plan for Asia in December that includes a more aggressive stance on China.
On November 7, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused China of trying to interfere in Canadian democracy and running a campaign of interference during the 2019 elections.
Trudeau’s statements came shortly after it was made public that the Canadian secret services warned the government that China financed several candidates for deputy in the federal Parliament in the general elections.
Source: TSF
