The mechanism sits in one clause of the Federal Prosecutor's Office statement. While holding his research post at BelGaN, the suspect was "simultaneously acting as a director of a Chinese company engaged in a similar manufacturing activity", a firm that appeared a few months after he joined the Belgian company and was financed by a Chinese investment fund [5]. Prosecutors put the rest carefully: the investigation "may point to" the unlawful transfer abroad of gallium nitride production IP, the seized storage and communications devices are still being analysed, and no court has convicted anyone [5][6].
A directorship is a registry fact before it is a criminal charge. The check that surfaces one is a name search against senior technical staff, and it does not need an export-control lawyer in the room.
Belgium's State Security Service wrote the pattern down before this arrest became public and calls them mirror companies: Chinese investors buy into a small Belgian company, research centre or spin-off with promising technology and not enough money, gain access to the technology, stand up a mirror plant in China to make it at scale, then sell the original on [14]. BelGaN met the entry condition. The Oudenaarde fab was in financial trouble in February 2022 when a consortium of Chinese investors bought it and renamed it, with new chief executive Alan Zhen Zhou describing an opportunity to build a "GaN valley" in Europe [9]. A company called Gankool opened in Fujian province a few months later to make the same technology, VRT reported [10]. The fab ran about 29 months under the new owners before it collapsed [19].
The screening argument cannot reach this deal. Belgium had no foreign investment screening regime when BelGaN changed hands, and the federal mechanism only came into force in July 2023, 17 months later [17]. What existed during those 29 months was internal: conflict-of-interest declarations, egress logging, and whoever held the process recipes. The site opened more than 40 years ago as MIETEC and was Belgium's last industrial chip fab, according to VRT [8]. Belgium had exactly one company in gallium nitride, the material behind fast chargers, EV power electronics, satellite communications and radar [7]. One site's staff list was the national position.
Detection came late and from an unglamorous place. The criminal investigation grew out of the examination of how the company failed, with investigators suspecting the buyers never meant to rescue it, only to obtain what it knew [12]. On the public record so far, the earliest reliable signal was insolvency paperwork. VRT reports the federal prosecutor counted about 15 espionage cases last year [15].
That leaves two axes for anyone running a lab with something scarce in it. The first is control of the entity: ownership, board seats, screening. The second is control of the artefacts: the repositories and process data, and who still holds an account. Screening moves only the first, and it moves it once, at the moment of sale. Distress moves both the wrong way at once, because the money that pays for security staff and the appetite for enforcing conflict rules leave together. The two questions that tell the axes apart are cheap to ask: which of your senior technical people hold directorships elsewhere, and what egress are you still logging in month two of an administration.
