Police in Canada have arrested a Chinese scientist employed by Hydro-Quebec, the country’s largest electricity company and which supplies electricity to the American Atlantic coast, accused of spying on behalf of China.

Hydro-Quebec and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced on Monday 14 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.

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The Canadian company, one of the largest hydroelectric dams in the world, said in a statement that Wang is a scientist whose work has focused on battery materials.

“He was denied access to information related to Hydro-Québec’s main mission,” the statement added. It was the company that alerted the Gendarmerie, in August of this year, of the employee’s criminal activities.

The Gendarmerie explained that Wang had published academic articles in scientific journals without the authorization of Hydro-Québec, the company for which he had worked since 2016.

“This is the first time such a charge has been laid in Canada,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector David Beaudoin said of the espionage charge under a security law. information. Wang will be arraigned on Tuesday.

Canadian media noted that Wang received a master’s degree in materials engineering from the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and, before joining Hydro-Quebec, he studied at Queen Mary University of London and at the University of Arkansas (USA).

‘Interference’

The announcement of Wang’s arrest comes at a time when Canada is mounting allegations of 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 against the risks of working in the Asian country.

Joly explained in a speech that Canada will unveil an Asian action plan in December that includes a more aggressive stance on China.

On November 7, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused China of attempting to interfere in Canadian democracy and waging a campaign of interference in the 2019 general election.

Trudeau’s allegation came shortly after news broke that the Canadian secret service had tipped off the government that China had funded several federal legislative candidates.

Relations between Canada and China have been strained since the 2018 arrest of a Huawei executive on US orders in Vancouver and Beijing’s detention of two Canadians in apparent retaliation. The three were released last year as part of an agreement.

(WITH INTERNATIONAL AGENCIES)