Former Siemens executive from Winter Park charged with stealing GE, Mitsubishi trade secrets

A retired Siemens Energy executive from Winter Park was criminally charged in federal court last week, accused of being part of a 2019 conspiracy to steal trade secrets from General Electric and Mitsubishi as the three companies were bidding to build and service a $500 million gas turbine plant in Virginia.

According to court documents, John Gibson, who served as Siemens’s executive vice president of power generation before retiring in 2020, is alleged to have helped coordinate the scheme by trading secrets given to employees of Dominion Energy, which opened “a competitive, closed bid process” for proposals to build and maintain the plant, according to a federal charging document filed Oct. 24. In exchange for information, it is alleged that Gibson showered Dominion employees with gifts.

Siemens, referred to in court documents as “Company 1,” was sued by General Electric in 2021 over the alleged conspiracy, claiming the thefts illegally helped Siemens win nine gas turbine contracts worth billions of dollars. The German-based company accused GE of exaggerating its claims before settling the lawsuit months later. In a statement to Bloomberg Law, a spokesperson said the company reviewed the allegations in 2020 using an outside firm and “took remedial measures” against employees involved in the scheme.

In the court documents filed last week, Theodore Fasca, a Dominion employee, and Michael Hillen, who worked for Siemens, were named as being in contact via private communications “on at least five different occasions” throughout the bidding process, with Fasca providing bid amounts from GE and Mitsubishi that Siemens later used to modify its own asking price, prosecutors allege. Siemens ultimately won the bid for Dominion’s “Peaker Project,” which was designed to generate power to “alleviate high grid load and improve electric grid resiliency,” court documents said.

The information was passed on to an unnamed co-conspirator, who then passed it to Gibson. In exchange, Fasca and others were gifted tickets to football games, hotel accommodations and dinners, according to the government.

Gibson also allegedly forwarded the information obtained from Fasca to another Siemens executive. In an email cited by prosecutors, Gibson wrote that the information needs to be studied ahead of a separate bid on a turbine project for Florida Power & Light, for which Siemens and GE both submitted bids.

In a 2021 deposition related to the lawsuit that year, Gibson allegedly acknowledged the price reduction was driven by his knowledge of GE’s bid price, adding Siemens’s move would “probably not” have happened without it.

A lawyer for Gibson declined to comment.

Fasca and Hillen both pleaded guilty for conspiracy to commit wire fraud in relation to the scheme, while two unnamed co-conspirators were mentioned in court documents as having provided information about it.

If Gibson is convicted, he is subject to federal forfeiture laws.