Harvard department head found guilty of accepting Chicom funding

 Chemistry World:

The former chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department has been convicted of all six felony charges he faced related to his receipt of millions of dollars in research funding from China, and now faces up to 26 years in prison and up to $1.2 million (£900,000) in fines. Charles Lieber, who is living with late-stage lymphoma, was found guilty on 21 December of two counts of making false statements to federal authorities, two counts of filing a false income tax return, and two counts of failing to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The 62-year-old will be sentenced at a later hearing.

Lieber was arrested in January 2020 for concealing his affiliation with the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China from his university and the US government agencies that funded his work. Harvard has placed him on paid administrative leave since his arrest, but those payments are expected to stop with the conviction.

He served as the principal investigator of his own research group at Harvard, which received more than $15 million in federal research grants between 2008 and 2019. But Lieber was not forthcoming with the university about becoming a ‘strategic scientist’ at WUT and, later, a contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents recruitment programme from at least 2012 through 2015 according to the US Department of Justice (DOJ).

Under the terms of his three-year Thousand Talents contract, WUT paid Lieber a salary of up to $50,000 per month, living expenses of up to $150,000 and awarded him more than $1.5 million to establish a research lab at WUT, the DOJ said. But he failed to disclose that income to the IRS. Lieber’s guilty verdicts came after less than three hours of jury deliberation, following a six-day trial.
...

What was it about this funding that made him not want to disclose it?  I suspect the nature of the work involved may have been a factor as well as obvious tax avoidance. 

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