August 8, 2017 was one of Shannon Yu’s last days in office. Coca Cola in Atlanta. Coca-Cola has struggled to maintain its dominance in the global soft drink market as its once-loyal customers turned to other brands advertised with images of aquifers, medicinal herbs or heavy sports rather than mainstream fashion. The new CEO’s plan was to restructure the business and lay off 1,200 people. Yu, a chemist in her 50s, was among them and had been briefed a few weeks earlier.

But every time the company fired someone, there was always the possibility that he would take something with him, and Coca-Cola, the company that owns the world’s best-known trade secret, the recipe for its soft drink, understood the risk and took it. measures. He implemented a logging scheme similar to that of the Secret Service and used software that tracked employee data usage. Shannon Yu had access to some of the company’s top-secret information, in particular, the chemical composition of the protective layer on the containers in which Coca-Cola is sold. That is, in the “second trade secret” of the company, as a US state judge later characterized it. These packages are expensive and in some ways more important than the soft drink recipe that is kept so theatrical, because without that protective layer, Coca-Cola can corrode the box it comes in. However, this chemical composition does not belong to a well-known company, but to multinational protective coating companies that cooperate with it.

Yu tried in every possible way to uncover the secrets of chemical synthesis, using all kinds of key numbers, computer programs and special software. After repeated setbacks and frustrations, she used her mobile phone to take pictures of a number of files from her computer and managed to “download” various encrypted files and save them to her personal Google account. It was her penultimate day in the company, and on August 17 she was on her way to the Chinese city of Weihai. There she met entrepreneurs who began to help her develop her own protective packaging company. A month later, he flew to Beijing, where he was supposed to apply for the Thousand Talents National Loan Guarantee Program. As emphasized in the statement, he intended to end Coca-Cola’s “international monopoly” of the global packaging industry. The centerpiece of her plan was the files she had taken from her personal computer at Coca-Cola, and she was apparently aware that she was thus involved in something illegal and would have adventures.

The goal is to copy the chemical composition of the protective layer on the container in which the soft drink is sold, i.e. “second trade secret” of the company.

Three years later, she was on trial when interested companies filed a series of lawsuits against her for theft and disclosure of trade secrets and commercial espionage. Representatives of the counterintelligence of a number of Western countries have repeatedly warned about the Chinese Thousand Talents program. They said its goal is to attract and hire Chinese scientists and engineers who are abroad for study and business, and lure them with promises of generous subsidies to overcome bureaucratic hurdles to return to China and set up a business there. But these promises also encourage the theft of trade secrets by foreign companies.

According to Jay Tabb, former director of the FBI, “these programs are really nothing more than a front for the Secret Service.” He emphasizes that it is now no secret to anyone that these programs are used by Beijing to recruit people “who will collect information illegally.” Yu’s case confirms this scenario, at least to some extent. At the same time, Yu was at Coca-Cola during a critical period when the company was accused of having one of the ingredients in its packaging dangerous. Many studies, but not all, show the effect of the BPA component on the human endocrine system, increasing the risk of a number of diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and early puberty. France banned the use of BPA in baby bottles in 2010 and later extended the ban to all food packaging in the country.