SH prosecutors charge GSK-related investigators with illegally obtaining info

The Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People's Court today heard the charges against a foreign couple for illegally obtaining and selling personal information about Chinese citizens, a case that is closely linked to the bribery investigation against GlaxoSmithKline Plc.

Peter William Humphrey, a British corporate investigator and his American wife Yingzeng Yu, were arrested more than a year ago. Their consultancy firm was hired by GSK for due diligence work in China.

GSK staff had reportedly spent hundreds of millions of yuan through travel agencies to bribe doctors and health officials in China in order to shore up sales.

The No.1 Branch of Shanghai Procuratorate said in an indictment today that Humphrey and Yu purchased as many as 256 pieces of citizen information from April 2009 to July 2013.

The prosecutors first questioned Humphrey in the morning session of the trial. The court is set to host a press briefing on the case after the trial is concluded later today.

Humphrey told the court that he initially set up the company in Hong Kong under the name ChinaWhy Co in 2003 and then registered the company in Shanghai in early 2004 because they needed to have a business identity in China's mainland to carry out business and hire employees.

Humphrey said that it has been purchasing services from external providers for information he wasn't able to obtain on his own. Most of the company's research work was done through the Internet to look for data and information that was available for everyone else and also to analyze information provided by the client, he said.

The company paid service fees to external consultant companies in order to obtain Chinese citizens' information and Humphrey said he's not aware how much each piece of information cost exactly, only saying that they may be in the range between several hundreds of yuan to several thousands of yuan.

The company has purchased the information from Zhou Hongyu and Liu Yu, both of whom will be trialed in a separate case.

Today, only selected media were allowed into the courtroom and dozens of reporters were looking at projection screens showing the microblog postings from the No.1 Intermediate People's Court, which posted the court hearings in Chinese transcripts.