By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-01-31 22:21:27 | Updated at 2025-02-01 04:05:14
5 hours ago
US prosecutors announced Friday that they had charged a former Federal Reserve adviser with economic espionage on behalf of China, accusing him of trying to steal trade secrets.
The US Department of Justice said it had charged John Harold Rogers, 63, with spying on behalf of Beijing while employed as a senior adviser at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (FRB).
The indictment, unsealed on Friday, said Rogers had leaked secret information from the Fed’s board and from its powerful rate-setting committee while he was working for the FRB’s Division of International Finance.
“The confidential information that Rogers allegedly shared with his Chinese co-conspirators, who worked for the intelligence and security apparatus of China and who posed as graduate students at a PRC university, is economically valuable when secret,” the DOJ said in a statement.
The DOJ said that, since 2018, Rogers had “allegedly exploited his employment with the FRB by soliciting trade-secret information regarding proprietary economic data sets”, including deliberations on tariffs against China.
“He passed that information electronically to his personal email account, in violation of FRB policy, or printed it prior to travelling to China, in preparation for meetings with his co-conspirators,” they added.
