Rio Tinto employees accused of espionage

Yangtse Evening Post
July 10, 2009

Today’s Yangtse Evening Post leads with a top headline shared by the majority of newspapers around the country, which concerns the call for stability in Xinjiang made by the Politburo Standing Committee.

Beneath the headline is a large photo of triplets who took this year’s gaokao and were admitted by the same department of the same university. The Wang sisters, from Zhengzhou, will attend the Chengdu University of Technology where they will study broadcasting. They chose a less prestigious school because not many students from Henan make it into elite schools and they wanted to make sure they stayed together.

Today’s papers also picked up the story of the Rio Tinto espionage case. Four employees of Australian mining giant Rio Tinto were detained on suspicion of espionage and stealing state secrets.

Among the four who were arrested, Hu Shitai (Stern Hu), a China-born Australian citizen, is the general manager of Rio’s iron-ore division in China. The other three, Liu Caikui, Wang Yong, and Ge Minqiang, are all Chinese citizens.

According to a statement made by Shanghai’s State Security Bureau, during iron ore negotiations this year, Hu stole state secrets from China via illegal means including “bribing internal staff of Chinese steel companies.”

Hu was arrested on July 5. On July 7, Tan Yixin, the head of iron ore trading at Shougang Group was also arrested for suspected commercial crimes. Since the two had close contact, the report suggest that the two arrests may be related.

There has been speculation, denied on all sides, that the arrests were connected to a failed deal between Rio Tinto and Chinalco. The Yangtse Evening Post does not mention that deal at all. It does quote an “industry insider” who says that the arrests demonstrate that China’s attitude during this year’s ore negotiations is clear: it’s not going to let anyone push it around.