The bizarre tale has emerged in a US whistleblower court case featuring a former lecturer at the university who says he was threatened with deportation unless he played along with the claimed deception.

Dr Masoud Samandi says the high-tech company he went to work for in Arizona - Materials and Electrochemical Research Corporation - submitted false claims to win research grants from the US departments of Energy and Defence as well as from NASA.

To win one grant from the Department of Energy, the company said it had built a sophisticated "filtered arc deposition system" - a method to apply hard coatings to a surface.

But according to Dr Samandi's statement to the US District Court in Tucson, "the depicted system was actually a photograph of a system created by Samandi at the University of Wollongong in Australia and was still located at that institution at the time of the proposal".

MER Corporation has received about $US50 million ($70 million) worth of grants from the three US Government agencies since 1985 for its sophisticated research - including into fuel cells and vehicle armour - through a scheme that favours applications from small US high-tech businesses.

But according to Dr Samandi, several of the grants won from the US Department of Energy were obtained by plagiarised data from projects carried out years earlier in Australia by his former engineering students.

"As an example of this fraudulent reporting, the sixth technical report submitted to DOE on January 22, 2003, is based entirely on results that were obtained by one of Samandi's PhD students, S.W. Huang, and were presented in his PhD thesis at University of Wollongong, Australia in 2000," reads Dr Samandi's statement to the court. "The experimental procedures, results and discussion presented in the report were copied directly from Huang's thesis."

Dr Samandi claims that other technical reports submitted by his then employer, dated February and September 2003, were "based substantially if not entirely on data" that included a thesis from another of his former honours students, Matthew Ted Gudze, in 1995.

Dr Samandi's suit alleges his employers told him he would be fired if he did not include plagiarised results in reports or if he did not charge time spent on private projects to government contracts.

Apart from the Department of Energy, he said, "false and fraud- ulent claims" for payment and approval were submitted with NASA and the Department of Defence.

The case, which is due to be heard this year according to Dr Samandi's lawyer, Timothy McInnis, has been joined by a separate but related action against the company by the US Justice Department.

The Justice Department complaint further alleges that MER Corporation executives used a non-existent venture capital firm, Southwest Investment Partners, to help it secure some grants.

The Justice Department claims that up to $US9 million worth of grants - including for optics and nanotechnology research - might have been improperly obtained by the company.

A lawyer for MER Corporation, Bruce Heurlin, said all of the allegations were being "vigorously denied" and that they would be defended in court.

"We feel we have a defence for all the allegations."

A second lawyer for the company, Jere Glover, said the Government had investigated Dr Samandi's allegations and had chosen to go to court with separate allegations. "We look forward to going to trial.' '