Ant Financial Services Group, the financial technology arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., today strongly denied a report published by The Wall Street Journal that it was involved in the theft of intellectual property and trade secrets from credit reporting agency Equifax Inc.

The Journal report, quoting people familiar with the matter, claims that Equifax went to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency in 2015 over concerns that former employees had removed thousands of pages of proprietary information before taking up positions with Ant Financial.

At the center of the allegations is a former Equifax employee named Daniel Zou, who worked in company’s Toronto office. The report claims the Zou removed employee information and other data from Equifax before leaving the company, a claim Zou denies.

Equifax partially confirmed the story, saying in a statement that they had become aware of “efforts by a former employee to obtain company information, and launched an internal investigation into his activities” before bringing the matter to the attention to law enforcement authorities.

“Although this individual had improperly obtained proprietary Equifax information,” Equifax said, “the information we determined was accessed was general in nature and not material or harmful to Equifax, consumers or our business clients.”

Ant Financial didn’t hold back, saying in a statement that the Journal report “contains false information about Ant Financial based on unsubstantiated allegations from anonymous sources” and “is full of innuendo based on disjointed facts and coincidence in timing.”

“Ant Financial did not use Equifax intellectual property or trade secrets, including code, algorithms or methodology in the development of our credit rating product,” the company said. “Ant Financial has found absolutely no evidence of Equifax software, data or code having been transferred to our systems.”

It then continues over several hundred words to deny other allegations made in the report. In particular, it said it was never working with the Chinese government on a credit rating program, one of the core conspiratorial allegations that were said to have motivated the alleged data theft to begin with.

The claim comes at a time of increased xenophobia in some quarters toward Chinese companies, most recently concerns that a security key being sold by Google LLC may be compromised because it’s made in the Middle Kingdom despite no evidence that it actually is compromised.

Photo: Ant Financial