New Delhi. Taiwanese prosecutors want to arrest Pete Lau. The CEO of OnePlus is accused of running an illegal hiring operation, under which more than 70 engineers were quietly hired from the island over the last ten years.
The Shilin District Prosecutor’s Office issued a warrant, and charged Lau under Taiwan’s Cross-Strait Act. This law regulates how companies from mainland China can operate in Taiwan. According to Bloomberg, two Taiwanese citizens who allegedly helped Lau have also been charged.
Prosecutors say OnePlus allegedly created a shell company in Hong Kong under a completely different name. Then in 2015, it opened a branch in Taiwan without government approval. The team there worked on smartphone software, and did testing and verification for OnePlus devices.
OnePlus needed Taiwan’s approval to hire local employees, which it did not obtain.
Under the Cross-Strait Act, any mainland Chinese company needs clear approval from Taiwanese authorities to recruit local talent. Prosecutors claim OnePlus skipped this step altogether while quietly building its engineering team.
Lau is not an unknown executive either. He co-founded OnePlus and made it a brand that gained popularity in a short period of time. Nowadays, he also runs the product division at Oppo, which made OnePlus an independent sub-brand in 2021.
Actually, Taiwan is taking strict action against Chinese companies keeping an eye on their chip talent. This warrant is part of a larger pattern. Taiwan is taking aggressive action against Chinese tech companies that it sees as talent theft. The island’s semiconductor engineers are now a national treasure.
Last August, authorities launched investigations against 16 Chinese companies for allegedly targeting high-tech employees. And in 2025, prosecutors issued a similar warrant for Grace Wang, chair of Apple supplier Luxshare Precision Industry.
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