PARIS – FRENCH Industry Minister Eric Besson on Thursday warned the country was facing ‘economic war’ following an industrial espionage scandal at automaker Renault.
‘Unfortunately, the affair appears serious,’ Mr Besson said on RTL radio, after discussing the issue with Renault management.
‘The expression ‘economic war’, while sometimes outrageous, for once is appropriate,’ he said, calling for improvements in industrial security at companies who receive public money.
‘It appears to concern the electric car, but I do not want to go further,’ said Mr Besson.
Renault said on Wednesday it had suspended three managers for leaking secrets about electric cars, with the company staking its future on environmentally friendly vehicles and aiming to produce them for the general market. — AFP
A French official, meanwhile, sought to play down the possibility of Chinese involvement in the matter, saying the government would wait for the results of an investigation.
In an interview published Saturday in the French newspaper Le Monde, Patrick Pelata, Renault’s chief operating officer, said that an internal investigation that began in August had led the company to conclude it was the target of “a system organized to collect economic, technological and strategic information to serve interests abroad.”
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PARIS (AFP) – French automaker Renault suspects that top managers suspended for alleged industrial espionage were supplying details of the company’s electric cars to China, a newspaper and officials said Friday.
The daily Le Figaro cited “several internal sources” at the company as saying that Renault and the French secret service suspect Chinese involvement in the affair.
“Suspicions are indeed leading in that direction,” towards China, said Bernard Carayon, a lawmaker for President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UM party who has authored several specialist reports on economic intelligence.
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France is the country that conducts the most industrial espionage on other European countries, even ahead of China and Russia, said leaked US diplomatic cables quoted on Tuesday by Norway’s Aftenposten.
‘French espionage is so widespread that the damages (it causes) the German economy are larger as a whole than those caused by China or Russia,’ an undated note from the US embassy in Berlin said, according to a Norwegian translation by Aftenposten.
The Norwegian daily of reference said last month it had obtained all the 250,000 US diplomatic cables WikiLeaks had accessed and would publish stories based on them independently of the whistleblowing website’s own releases.
Its Tuesday article based on leaked cables included an October 2009 comment from Berry Smutny, the head of German satellite company OHB Technology, quoted in the diplomatic note.
‘France is the Empire of Evil in terms of technology theft, and Germany knows it,’ a Norwegian translation of Smutny’s comment in the cable read.
OHB Technology became known to the general public in January 2010 when it obtained a contract for the construction of several satellites for the Galileo satellite navigation system, a much-delayed European challenger to the American-developed Global Positioning System (GPS).
The small German firm won the bid for the contract over Astrium, a subsidiary of pan-European giant EADS.
A leaked US cable posted on Monday by Aftenposten described Franco-German competition in terms of spy satellite development.
The cable said Germany was developing, with the help of the US, its own High Resolution Optical Satellite System (HiROS), despite the objections of France, which is leading pan-European efforts in the field with its Helios satellites.
PARIS (AFP) – Industrial espionage that targeted Renault posed a serious threat to the French carmaker’s “strategic assets”, the company said on Thursday.
Renault said on Wednesday that it had suspended three managers for leaking secrets about its electric cars.
This decision was to “protect, without delay, the strategic, intellectual and technological assets of our company,” senior vice president Christian Husson told AFP.
“For Renault, this is a very serious incident concerning persons in a particularly strategic position in the company,” he said.
A months-long probe had established a “body of evidence which shows that the actions of these three colleagues were contrary to the ethics of Renault and knowingly and deliberately placed at risk the company’s assets,” said Husson.
Renault has staked its future on electric cars as automakers face up to rising demand for more environmentally friendly methods of transport.
The suspensions were the latest in a series of industrial espionage scandals to hit France’s huge and strategically important auto industry.
French Industry Minister Eric Besson warned on Thursday that the country was facing “economic war” in the light of the espionage at Renault.
