Former General Motors engineer, Shanshan Du, and her husband have been accused and found guilty of conspiring to sell GM trade secrets to Chinese automaker Chery Automobile Co. The accusations that Du was found guilty of consisted of the following: conspiracy to posses trade secrets without authorization, and two counts of unauthorized possession of trade secrets.

She was in fact charged with three counts of wire fraud, but was cleared on those charges. On the other hand, her husband was found guilty of all six charges, including a seventh charge of obstruction of justice.

Before leaving GM‘s advanced technology group in March of 2005, Du copied thousand of internal documents onto an external hard drive. To be more specific, the documents Du copied had to do with General Motor‘s hybrid technology, which Du planned to use in a joint venture with China’s Chery automobiles. It is very likely that Du and her husband will face jail time, and up to $250,000 in fines, even though the sentencing phase hasn’t occurred yet.