Mysterious factory break-in raises suspicions about Chinese visit
Mysterious factory break-in raises suspicions about Chinese visit
A burglary at an innovative Scottish wave-power company went forgotten, until a very similar project appeared in China
Pelamis’s product (above) and the Chinese one.
Ewen MacAskill
Monday 10 October 2016
It was an unusual burglary, in which four or five laptops were stolen from a Scottish renewable energy manufacturer in the dead of a March night in 2011. So innovative was the company that it had been been visited by a 60-strong delegation led by China’s then vice-premier only two months before.
Nothing else was taken from the company and the crime, while irritating, went unsolved and forgotten – until a few years later pictures began emerging that showed a remarkably similar project manufactured in the world’s most populous country.
Then some people who were involved in the Scottish company, Pelamis Wave Power, started making a connection between the break-in and the politician’s visit, which was rounded off with dinner and whisky tasting at Edinburgh Castle hosted by the then Scottish secretary, Michael Moore.
Max Carcas, who was business development director at Pelamis until 2012, said the similarities between the Scottish and Chinese products were striking. Speaking publicly for the first time, he said: “Some of the details may be different but they are clearly testing a Pelamis concept.”
The Scottish Pelamis wave-power device.
The Chinese device.
It might be that China’s engineers had been working along roughly the same lines as the UK engineers. Or it may be that China attempted to replicate the design based on pictures of the Pelamis project freely available on the web.
Or there could be a darker explanation: that Pelamis was targeted by China, which has been repeatedly accused of pursuing an aggressive industrial espionage strategy. The answer matters, given security concerns raised by the government’s award of the Hinkley Point nuclear contract to China.
“It was a tremendous feather in our cap to be the only place in the UK outside of London that the Chinese vice-premier visited,” Carcas said. “We did have a break-in about 10 weeks after, when a number of laptops were stolen. It was curious that whoever broke in went straight to our office on the second floor rather than the other company on the first floor or the ground floor.”
Carcas, who is now managing director of the renewable energy consultancy Caelulum, added: “I could infer all sorts of things but I do not want to say.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/10/mysterious-factory-break-in-raises-suspicions-about-chinese-visit
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