According to Dutch daily NRC, Wingtech founder and Nexperia boss Zhang Xuezheng allegedly forced the company to place an oversized order from his privately owned chip outfit, WingSkySemi. Nexperia only needed half the parts, but Zhang still rammed the $200 million deal through while shutting out anyone who raised a fuss.

The paper claims several top brass, including financial officers and the chief legal bod, got the boot after challenging the move. With accounts frozen and execs sidelined, the board ran squealing to the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, who eventually gave Zhang the shove and yanked the company back under Dutch control.

This makes a mockery of the idea that the whole move was about keeping Dutch or EU tech from wafting off to China. The New York Times quotes court documents saying that US officials had been nagging the Dutch to boot Zhang for months.

One reportedly complained, “The fact that the company’s CEO is still the same Chinese owner is problematic.”

Unsurprisingly, Zhang didn’t take the eviction lying down and apparently went running to Beijing for backup. That turned the corporate scandal into a full-on geopolitical tantrum.

Beijing wasn’t slow to retaliate. In the days following the seizure, China banned Nexperia’s Chinese factories from exporting their wares. Meanwhile, Apple and other US tech giants like Nvidia and Qualcomm are suddenly finding themselves under Chinese antitrust probes.

Rhodium Group director Reva Goujon told the New York Times, “All these governments are very uncomfortable with [interdependent supply chains] and would like to see these assets back in their possession.”

Given that 90 per cent of the world’s most advanced chips are churned out in Taiwan, the looming spectre of a China-Taiwan bust-up has every government scrambling to get their chip ducks in a row.