A federal jury has convicted a previous College of Kansas professor of illegally concealing his ties to the Chinese governing administration.
Jurors on Thursday uncovered Feng Tao, 50, responsible of three counts of wire fraud and one particular depend of generating wrong statements for not disclosing his work with a government-affiliated college in China.
Justice Section prosecutor Adam Barry stated Mr. Tao concocted “an elaborate lie” to defraud the federal government and the College of Kansas.
Even though employed full-time by China’s Fuzhou College as a Shifting Scholar Distinguished Professor, Tao was at the identical time a total-time staff of the College of Kansas in which he executed investigate funded by the U.S. Section of Electricity and the National Science Foundation.
Tao was required to file once-a-year conflict of desire reports as a complete-time school member to notify the College of Kansas of any exterior employment. Tao did not seek out authorization from the college in advance of coming into his arrangement with the Chinese authorities-backed college.
Tao also accredited reimbursement requests affiliated with DOE and NSF grants in which he indicated that he had made all important disclosures to the federal government and the University of Kansas.
In 2018, Mr. Tao moved to China to do the job whole-time at the Chinese university, telling College of Kansas administrators that he was in Europe, according to federal prosecutors.
Tao’s protection lawyer, Peter Zeidenberg, reported the professor was a prolific researcher and described his arrangement with the Chinese university as “moonlighting.” He reported Tao accomplished all research connected to the federal grants from the U.S. federal government and was not compensated for his operate with Fuzhou University.
Zeidenberg has moved to dismiss the costs.
Tao’s case was component of the Justice Department’s “China Initiative,” developed in 2018 to root out espionage and trade mystery theft.
He faces place to 20 a long time in jail and a $250,000 high-quality for wire fraud, and 10 yrs in jail and a $250,000 great for every system fraud rely.
