A New Aixtron

In today's Wall Street Journal, there is an article about the demise of the deal between Aixtron and a Chinese conglomerate that tried to buy it.  Now is appears the Chinese have changed the names of the players and will try again.  this time, it is Lattice Semiconductor, and the new Chinese entity is Canyon Bridge Capital Partners.  In case this set-up sounds familiar, the Chinese created a new company to buy Aixtron, then manipulated orders to lower the share price.  The New York Times reported the details, much to their credit.  This time, they created a new company to set out to buy up certain technologies they want.  If they keep these companies names moving around, they are harder for the U.S government to keep track of and less likely to find interference.  If they successfully buy through any one of them, the government then owns the asset.   It is a shell game they can play forever, since they are state-owned enterprises.

The evidence suggests that somebody is keeping track of these deals and letting Congress known.  Twenty-two Congressmen sent a letter to Jack Lee to let him know that they wanted this investigated, and it is not often that you can find 22 people to put their name on something on the Hill unless there is something going on.