One Flight to Beijing, Four Hundred Lost Jobs: Belgium Charges a Former BelGaN Executive With GaN Chip Espionage

On September 7, 2026, Belgium’s Federal Prosecutor’s Office confirmed something it had kept secret for nearly four months: on May 10, police at Brussels Zaventem airport arrested a 52-year-old man holding both Belgian and Chinese nationality as he was about to board a flight to Beijing. The man — identified in Belgian media only as “H.L.” — was until 2024 a senior manager in the research department of BelGaN, the gallium-nitride chip maker in Oudenaarde, East Flanders, that collapsed into bankruptcy that summer, throwing more than 400 people out of work.

The charges read like a corporate-thriller indictment: espionage, participation in a criminal organization, misuse of company assets, unlawful disclosure of trade secrets, and bankruptcy offences. Prosecutors say the investigation “may point to the unlawful transfer abroad of specialised intellectual property and trade secrets relating to the production of gallium nitride chips” — a wide-bandgap semiconductor technology used in electric vehicles, aerospace, and military applications. Searches have been carried out and data storage devices seized.

The alleged scheme, as investigators see it

The detail that elevates this case from routine IP dispute to alleged state-adjacent espionage is the timeline. BelGaN was established in September 2021, when Hong Kong-based Chinese investors acquired what had been ON Semiconductor Belgium BV from onsemi — a fab whose GaN development lineage stretches back to 2009. The new owners appointed their own managers. Several months after H.L. became active at BelGaN, according to reporting by De Standaard and RTBF that broke the story, he also took on a managerial role at a Chinese company in China.

That company — Gankool — had been founded shortly after BelGaN came under Chinese ownership in 2021, was financed by a Chinese investment fund, and, prosecutors note, produced “exactly the same technology” as the Belgian fab. The suspicion articulated by investigators is stark: the 2024 bankruptcy that initially looked like a purely economic failure may have been, at least in part, collateral damage of an acquisition whose real purpose was extracting technology rather than building a business.

H.L. is not the only former executive in the investigation’s crosshairs. De Standaard and RTBF report that BelGaN’s last CEO, Chinese national Alan Zhen Zhou, is also believed to have played a role at Gankool and is currently wanted by Belgian authorities. Prosecutors confirmed to Euronews that a second suspect is being sought. H.L.’s lawyer, Dimitri de Beco, told the outlets his client denies all allegations. The detained man remains in pre-trial detention awaiting trial.

What was actually worth stealing

Gallium nitride is not a household name, but it is one of the quiet battlegrounds of the tech cold war. GaN power chips switch faster and waste less energy than silicon, which is why they sit at the heart of EV chargers, data-center power supplies, radar, and military electronics. When BelGaN went under in July 2024, after a plan to convert the Oudenaarde site into a dedicated GaN foundry fell through, Politico called it a visible dent in Europe’s microchip ambitions — the continent had lost one of its few industrial GaN manufacturing sites.

The aftermath now reads differently in hindsight. At the January 2025 bankruptcy auction, Chinese companies did most of the buying, according to trade press accounts of the sale. A partial redemption arrived in April 2025, when administrators struck a deal with an unnamed European investor to repurpose the site for photonic integrated circuits with a pledged investment of up to €250 million — a different technology, on the same ground where the GaN line died.

If the prosecutors’ framing holds up in court, the BelGaN story becomes a case study in the acquisition-of-strategic-asset playbook that European security services have warned about for a decade: buy a struggling but technologically distinctive firm, staff it with trusted managers, seed a parallel entity back home, transfer licences and know-how, and let the original wither once the intellectual payload has been extracted. The 400 workers in Oudenaarde were, in this reading, never the point.

A continent-wide pattern

The BelGaN case did not land in a vacuum. Euronews notes that several China-linked espionage investigations have opened across Europe in recent months. In June 2026, a Canadian intern of Chinese origin was arrested in Mons, Belgium, on suspicion of spying; the suspect worked in IT at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe and had access to sensitive data. In 2025, Jian Guo, a former assistant to German far-right MEP Maximilian Krah, was sentenced to five years in prison for passing sensitive European Parliament documents to Beijing. And this summer, two British-Chinese dual nationals were convicted in the UK for surveilling exiled Hong Kong dissidents on British soil.

The timing is also awkward geopolitically. The disclosure came the same week that Huawei’s long-delayed US racketeering trial opened in federal court in Brooklyn, and as Washington weighs further chip-export restrictions while preparing AI-cyber talks with Beijing. Semiconductor espionage cases used to be prosecuted quietly; they are now part of the public temperature of US-China and EU-China relations.

Why it matters for AI infrastructure

For an industry that measures its appetite in gigawatts, GaN is an AI-adjacent story. The power-delivery layers of AI data centers — the racks, the rectifiers, the fast chargers that keep hyperscale compute fed — are precisely where GaN efficiency gains compound into real money and real thermal headroom. Europe losing its GaN manufacturing competence while the technology allegedly migrates to China through a bankrupt fab in Flanders is not just a Belgian industrial tragedy; it is a data point in the broader de-coupling of Western AI infrastructure from the supply chains that build it.

Belgian authorities have not said when H.L. will face trial, nor whether the still-at-large second suspect — or the Hong Kong investors behind the 2021 acquisition — will ever face a Belgian courtroom. What is already clear is the precedent: European prosecutors are now willing to name semiconductor know-how transfer as espionage, with everything that implies for sentencing, extradition politics, and future cross-border acquisitions.

For the 400 families in Oudenaarde, the news reopens a wound. Their employer’s collapse was narrated for two years as a story of bad luck and bad markets. The federal prosecutor now suggests it may also have been a heist.