He lied under oath — and now this NC man will spend even more time in prison, feds say
A North Carolina man was serving years in prison after authorities said he conspired to steal his company’s trade secrets.
Then, he was sentenced with additional prison time after prosecutors said he lied under oath about stealing over 15,000 files containing the company’s secret information.
Craig German, 60, of Kernersville, a town about 20 miles west of Greensboro, North Carolina, was charged with perjury and false statements to a government agency, according to sentencing documents obtained by McClatchy News.
German’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment from McClatchy News on May 3.
German worked as a cost analyst for a subsidiary of a publicly traded corporation whose business “included the design, development, manufacturing, marking and services of jet aircraft” in Georgia, according to the 2020 indictment.
He started working for the company in July 2014, and as part of his job responsibilities, prosecutors said he signed agreements regarding the protection of “proprietary information.”
After spending three years with the Georgia company, German gave his notice to his employer in October 2017, prosecutors said. Court documents state that the day before he submitted his two-week notice, he copied more than 15,000 of the company’s proprietary electronic files to a storage device.
In September 2019, German pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to steal trade secrets. The following month, the former employee met with authorities to share some more information related to his guilty plea, court documents show.
During that meeting, German denied copying or transferring 15,000 files onto a device and said his former company “made it up,” court documents state.
Based on that guilty plea, German was sentenced in February 2020 to conspiracy to sell trade secrets. During his sentencing hearing, prosecutors said he made another false declaration and claimed he was asked by his superior to save all the files.
On Dec. 2, 2021, German was convicted of two new charges of lying under oath.
As part of the new sentencing, he reportedly admitted to taking certain files so that he and three other individuals could “engineer a better system for de-icing airplane wings,” his attorney stated in court documents.
Prosecutors said German, along with other individuals, used that information to “speed the design and regulatory review process for a competing aircraft company,” according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia.
German’s attorney stated the former employee realized that was wrong and reported the thefts to a whistleblower hotline.
“Without this phone call it is very possible that the theft of these trade secrets may never have been discovered,” attorney Stan Fitzgerald stated in court documents.
German was sentenced to an additional 20 months in prison on charges of perjury and false statements to a government agency, according to the release. The man was already serving 70 months for his first sentence.
