Five people have been indicted for allegedly stealing and selling a technique behind the manufacturing of supercritical semiconductor cleaning equipment to China.

According to the Suwon District Prosecutors' Office on Monday, they arrested and indicted two former employees of Samsung Electronics subsidiary Semes, a broker and the head of a subcontractor, on charges of violating the unfair competition prevention law. Another subcontractor worker was indicted without pretrial detention.

One of the former Semes employees who had left the company in 2016 is accused of stealing the blueprint for the cleaning equipment, which Semes had developed, through the subcontractor chief in June 2021 who supposedly received a three-point-eight billion won investment in return.

Through the broker, who allegedly received one-point-six billion won, the ex-employee is suspected of attempting to sell ten units of the equipment manufactured using the stolen blueprint as well as leak the information to a Chinese company.

The delivery, however, was never made as the prosecution's investigation began.

The former worker had been facing separate charges since last year for allegedly leaking Semes' wet cleaning equipment technology.