Brit banged up for GSK data theft

British corporate investigator Peter Humphrey, who was arrested last year after working for GlaxoSmithKline in China, has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail for trafficking personal data.
Humphrey and his naturalised American wife Yu Yingzeng were found guilty by a Shanghai court; Yingzeng got two years.
The case has all the makings of a classic crime novel: the couple were hired by GSK’s China boss Mark Reilly to investigate the source of allegations of bribery against the company; they were also briefed to find out who sent a sex tape featuring Reilly to his bosses in London.
However, no sooner had they completed the internal investigation, they found themselves being arrested on what some claim to be trumped up charges.
Judge Yu Jian, of Shanghai’s No.1 Intermediate People’s Court, said that ChinaWhys, the investigation company run by Humphrey and his wife, had purchased mobile phone records, customs information and household registration details over a four-year period until their detention in July 2013.
“The two defendants paid 800 yuan (£80) to 2000 yuan per piece of information,” the judge said, according to an official microblog from the court. “In total, they bought 256 pieces of information,” he said.
Asked why he had continued to buy personal information even after one of his sources, a Chinese businessman named Liu Yu, was arrested, Humphrey said they had been trying to “adjust” their investigations to be less reliant on personal information.
“In the two month’s from Liu Yu’s arrest to our own arrest we were gradually adjusting the way we work and our investigations. but before we finished the adjustment we were arrested,” he said.