Probation but no jail time for China-born maths professor over tax return errors in US
- Xiao Mingqing was earlier found guilty of tax errors and of failing to disclose a Chinese bank account in China Initiative case
- But the Illinois mathematician was cleared of concealing his ties to China while seeking federal grant funding
China-born Illinois mathematics professor Xiao Mingqing was sentenced to a year of probation, with no jail time, on Monday after he was earlier found guilty of tax return errors in the United States.
In May, the academic, then 60, was also convicted of failing to disclose a Chinese bank account in a prosecution under the China Initiative.
In the trial, Xiao – a researcher at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale – was acquitted by a jury of making a false statement in connection with a grant proposal submitted to the US National Science Foundation. The foundation awarded him around US$150,000 for research in 2019.
According to court documents, Xiao had been accused of obtaining the federal grant money by concealing support from the Chinese government and a Chinese university.
The judge also found prosecutors had failed to prove two related wire fraud charges.
The US government had asked the judge to impose a one-year jail sentence on Xiao, but the judge said imprisoning the mathematician – who posed no threat of reoffending – would serve no purpose, the news service of the journal Science reported on Monday.