Tuesday, November 11, 2008

$1 Billion Trade Secrets Theft - Employee Charged

CA - A former Intel Corp. engineer has been charged with stealing trade secrets worth $1 billion from the chip maker while he worked for its main rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Federal prosecutors in Massachusetts alleged this week in a five-count indictment that Biswamohan Pani, 33, illegally downloaded more than a dozen confidential documents from Intel's computer system in California during a four-day stretch in June. He had already resigned from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel, but remained on the payroll and still had access to the company's computers while he burned unused vacation days.

What Pani's supervisors didn't know then is that instead of taking the time to investigate a hedge fund job Pani claimed he was considering, he had actually started working for AMD and for a brief period was on both companies' payrolls. (more)