RSF man dealt $337 million fraud, DOJ says
Special to The Grapevine, 10 July 2021
The United States District Court for the Northern District of California this week unsealed an indictment returned by a federal grand jury in San Francisco charging Rancho Santa Fe resident Racho Jordanov with conspiracy to commit trade secret theft and wire fraud, international money laundering, and related charges including obstruction of justice.
Jordanov was the co-founder and former Chief Executive Office of JHL Biotech. He was charged along with Rose Lin, another of the company’s co-founders and former Chief Operating Officer
Acting United States Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds, Internal Revenue Service ̶ Criminal Investigations, Special Agent in Charge Michael Daniels, and Federal Bureau of Investigation, Special Agent in Charge Craig D. Fair announced the unsealed indictment.
According to the indictment, in 2012, Raco Ivanov Jordanov, also known as “Racho” Jordanov, 73, of Rancho Santa Fe and Rose Lin, also known as Rose Sweihorn Tong, 72, of South San Francisco, Calif., were alleged to have co-founded JHL Biotech, Inc., a biopharmaceutical start-up headquartered in Zhubei, Taiwan, with offices in Wuhan, China, and Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. JHL Biotech is now known as Eden Biologics, Inc. and Chime Biologics (Wuhan), Ltd.
The indictment alleges that Jordanov and Lin, beginning as early as 2008, engaged in a fraudulent scheme to steal thousands of confidential and proprietary documents from Genentech that eventually helped JHL Biotech secretly accelerate its development and production of “biosimilars,” or generic versions of Genentech biologics. Some of the confidential documents stolen from Genentech and obtained by Jordanov and Lin allegedly contained trade secrets.
