Glendale man convicted of sending trade secrets to former employer’s competitors

A 44-year-old Glendale man was convicted this week of stealing trade secrets from his former employer, a Pasadena aircraft avionics company, and distributing them to three competitors in a revenge plot after he was fired, officials said.

After a September bench trial, a judge convicted electrical engineer Derek Wai Hung Tam Sing of 32 counts of violating the Economic Espionage Act when he distributed trade secrets of Rogerson Kratos, allowing competitors to reverse engineer the company’s products, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

Sing, who reportedly was late in arriving to work and on completing assignments and had an unprofessional attitude was fired in 2012, officials said.

In 2013, Sing used email addresses created under a fake name and the public Wi-Fi at Starbucks to send the stolen trade secrets to competitors — both foreign and within the United States — that produced avionics.

A judge ruled that Sing illegally sent seven schematics — four of which he possessed illegally — to three different companies, along with a document explaining the importance of the information and with instructions to reverse engineer the products.

“Sing attempted to hurt his former employer by stealing its trade secrets, making the material easily understood by engineers at other companies, and using an assumed identity to send the proprietary information in the hope it would be used to develop a product to compete with his former employer,” U.S. Attorney Eileen Decker said in a statement.

He is slated to be sentenced in March.

--

Alene Tchekmedyian, alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @atchek