Three Chinese companies are suing Liebherr Mining & Construction Equipment, asking the judge to rule that they did not conspire to rip off dump truck designs and build a copycat version in China.
The latest legal action comes in response to a longstanding lawsuit by the Swiss-German OEM, demanding $40m in damages.
The three firms — China Space Sanjiang Group (CSSG), Wuhan Sanjiang Import Export, and Aerospace Heavy Industry (AHI) — contend that Liebherr’s lawsuit has unfairly “lumped” them together into a “purportedly long-running conspiracy.”
The Chinese companies assert that if there was a scheme to steal the designs, they knew nothing about the plot when the Detroit engineering firm at the heart of the scandal contacted them in 2011.
Their complaint has elevated the case to the federal courts after it was filed in the Newport News district court, even as the existing lawsuit continues to flounder in the local circuit court.
The fresh lawsuit comes just weeks after revelations that the FBI has launched its own investigation into the case as the US government attempts to clamp on perceived acts of industrial espionage.
The original complaint alleges that thousands of documents were stolen — from truck designs to vendor information and factory layouts — allowed the Chinese firms to build the trucks “at a fraction of the time and cost, and a fraction of the manpower as could be accomplished by lawful means.”
In 2013, Liebherr upped the rhetoric, calling the act “industrial espionage of a serious and brazen nature … involving the wholesale theft of trade secrets from a US manufacturing facility and the use of these trade secrets to help multiple Chinese competitors design a competing product.”
The designs in question pertain to a super-large category of Liebherr dump truck that stands 8.8m tall —triple the height of a typical dump truck — and with the capacity for a 400-tonne payload.
The three Chinese firm’s court filing read: “If such a conspiracy existed, CSSG, Wuhan and AHI were not a part of it,” noting that even if the schematics from the Detroit firm “contained Liebherr trade secrets”, the firms could not be liable if they “did not have the requisite knowledge at the time.”
