Bristol-Myers Employee Stole Company Secrets
8 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // February 4th, 2010 // 8:18 am
And he hoped to use the info to set up a pharmaceutical company in India. Shalin Jhaveri, 29, worked as a technical operations associated since November 2007, but was fired the Bristol-Myers’ Syracuse, NY, facility this week, Reuters reports.
“Jhaveri stole numerous trade secrets as part of a plan to establish a pharmaceutical firm in his native India which would compete with Bristol-Myers Squibb in various markets around the world,” the Justice Department said in a statement, according to Reuters. He was arrested and ordered held without bail ahead of a detention hearing on Monday. He could face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
He was accused of taking more than 1,300 documents from the company that he spent hours over the course of several days downloading to his laptop and portable hard drives, according to an FBI affidavit filed in a New York federal court, Reuters continues.
Bristol-Myers corporate security on Dec. 22, 2009 notified its in-house computer security experts that Jhaveri was taking confidential material. They learned days later that he planned to start a pharma business in India with his father, the affidavit said. FBI special agent Timothy Dwyer said that on Feb. 2 he observed a meeting at a hotel between Jhaveri and an unidentified individual from whom he believed could provide financing for the venture in India.
The FBI agent said that he interviewed Jhaveri after the meeting during which Jhaveri said he took the documents, understood they were proprietary and confidential and that he had shown some of them to the unnamed individual who was not connected to Bristol-Myers.
Virtual Office
This happens everyday unfortunately a lot of companies don’t have the technoolgy to protect themselves nor the inclination. I think they should prosecute with the maximum sentence carried
Former Pharma Marketing Director
I agree with Virtual Office…..Sounds like many people are working from virtual office these days…
While I am very critical of many of the things in Pharma today, this does not give license to anyone to steal.
Proprietary information needs to be fiercely protected….
Good that they caught him…
Former Pharma Executive
This is the tip of the iceberg. As pharma companies are setting up shop in India, china and other countries to help their bottom line, this will become a common place event.
confidentiality and propietary knowhow will go out the window for others to reproduce
RandDChemist
So let’s just outsource to China and India. What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
marcy stone
And yet these companies continue to outsource all sorts of things to India and China to save money; neither country has a history of patent compliance or even patent recognition. This guy was in the U.S., try and get his partners in far away lands.
Marcy
pharmavet
I can count at least 3-4 very successful biotech companies that were started by scientists who expropriated intellectual property from their former employers. Remember, when you work for a company your name goes on the invention but the patent rights revert to the company. They’re not yours to steal, at least while the patent is valid. If you’re going to steal them, you had best set up shop somewhere away from the long arm of the law.
Doc
Was this before or after BMS announced a salary freeze, maybe he was trying to get the 2% he got last year!
Inbound call handling
Hah, if you can’t trust your employees, who can you trust?
I guess this can’t be really done, I guess this can only be done by law and patents and then private detectives tracking former employees to make sure they’re not part of an organisation that utilises the technology of the previous employer.