We recently linked to a story about seven people being charged with stealing trade secrets in syntactic foam.

Our source speculated that CBM International Inc. (CBMI) in Texas was the company involved in the controversy, which was confirmed by a Law360 story.

According to Law360, a Chinese national recruited Shan Shi, who is among those charged, to form CBMI.

An affidavit says that CBMI hired several employees from Trelleborg in 2015 and had them share trade secrets. Backed by $2.2 million from its parent company, known as CBMF, CBMI stole models, ingredient lists and spreadsheets full of data and formulas that allowed it to build its own factory in China and produce and market a syntactic foam component much cheaper than Trelleborg could–which CBMI then offered to sell to Trelleborg.