Legal talks in Hytera criminal-conspiracy case continue, with key extradition expected

Initial federal-court conferences in the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) criminal-conspiracy case against Hytera Communications and several individuals will be continued in October, by which time one key individual is expected to be extradited to the U.S., according to statements made during a conference conducted this week.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Court John Tharp Jr. conducted a telephone conference call among relevant parties and—at Hytera’s unopposed request—decided to continue the conference on Oct. 20 “to facilitate the ongoing review of the voluminous discovery and in recognition of the fact that at least one defendant will be extradited to the U.S. and will require time to review discovery, as well,” according to a minute entry in the case docket.

During the telephone conference, it was disclosed that Gee Siong Kok—also known as G.S. Kok—is expected to be extradited from the United Kingdom to the United States within the next couple weeks.

G.S. Kok is a former senior vice president at China-based Hytera Communications who is widely credited for leading Hytera’s efforts to develop products based on the DMR protocols. G.S. Kok joined Hytera in 2008, shortly after leaving Motorola (the company had not yet changed its name to Motorola Solutions at the time), where he worked at a Malaysian facility.

Hytera e-mails indicate that G.S. Kok was recruited personally by the Hytera CEO beginning in June 2007, ultimately offering him a 78% salary increase and stock options ultimately worth more than $2 million to lead Hytera’s DMR group, the DoJ criminal complaint states. G.S. Kok submitted his letter of resignation to Motorola on Dec. 31, 2007, and joined Hytera on Feb. 1, 2008.

At the time, Hytera Communications was struggling to develop DMR products. G.S. Kok noted this in a 2008 e-mail to the Hytera CEO, stating that he was “surprise[d] to find out that we do not have a proto-type radio after 3 years” of DMR development by the Hytera prior to the arrival of former Motorola employees and the DMR trade secrets, the criminal complaint states.

“Company B [Hytera] needed to steal Company A’s [Motorola’s] trade secrets to compete in the DMR market,” according to the criminal complaint.

G.S. Kok allegedly recruited other Motorola employees in Malaysia to join his Hytera team during the next five months. Several of these recruits—named as conspirators in the DoJ criminal complaint—copied tens of thousands of Motorola DMR documents and brought them to Hytera. Although some of the alleged conspirators were told that Hytera would rewrite the DMR software, the China-based LMR company often just copied and pasted software code—even including typos, according to the DoJ criminal complaint.

These stolen trade secrets and copyrighted software code have been the focus of a civil lawsuit filed by Motorola Solutions against Hytera Communications in 2017. After a four-month trial, a federal-court jury unanimously found Hytera guilty—a finding that was upheld by U.S. District Court Judge Charles Norgle in March 2020.

During the civil trial that began in November 2019, Hytera attorneys acknowledged that three former Motorola employees—G.S. Kok, Samuel Chia and Y.T. Kok—accessed more than 7,000 Motorola documents prior to each of them leaving and joining Hytera shortly thereafter in 2008. However, Hytera attorneys described the three engineers as “bad apples” who did not share with anyone else at Hytera that the DMR trade secrets and software were taken from Motorola.

All three of the former Motorola employees that were hired by Hytera invoked the Fifth Amendment when interviewed as part of the civil-suit proceedings. The DoJ indictment notes that there are individual defendants charged in the Hytera criminal conspiracy case, but all of those names were redacted from the publicly available version of the indictment.

In addition to G.S. Kok, Samuel Chia and Y.T. Kok, the DoJ criminal complaint identified four other individual conspirators in April: Wong Kiat Hoe, Yu Kok Hoong, Chua Siew Wei and Phaik Ee Ooi. Hytera Communications—as a company—was indicted for criminal conspiracy in February, when the names of the alleged individual conspirators were redacted.

Both the civil and criminal cases against Hytera center around allegations that Hytera developed much of its successful DMR product line using trade secrets and copyrighted software that was stolen from Motorola Solutions about 14 years ago. For this reason, while the criminal and civil cases against Hytera Communications are separate legal matters, much of the evidence is the same.

In fact, a statement during this weeks telephone conference revealed that there are more than 10 million documents—not including electronic communications like e-mails—cited as evidence in the criminal-conspiracy case against Hytera Communications. However, “only” a few hundred thousand of these documents are new to Hytera’s attorneys, because the vast majority of them have been introduced in the civil case.

The civil and criminal cases against Hytera Communications also may be having intermingling impacts on the China-based LMR company. A few weeks ago, Hytera Communications failed to make a large royalty payment to Motorola Solutions based on Hytera’s DMR sales during the last three years. Hytera attorneys had indicated that non-payment of the court-order royalty fee was a possibility, citing the company’s cost to defend itself against the DoJ’s criminal-conspiracy charges as one reason why the money might not be available.

With Hytera Communications unwilling to meet its royalty obligations, Motorola Solutions has asked Judge Norgle to find Hytera in contempt of court and to issue a global injunction that would block Hytera from selling products throughout the world.

Meanwhile, both Hytera Communications and Motorola Solutions have appealed certain rulings by Judge Norgle to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which recently decided to consolidate the appeals into a single cases, according to court documents.