A former Bristol Myers Squibb employee admitted that he stole secret formulas so he could start a company in his native India. Shalin Jhaveri, 30, pleaded guilty to stealing the trade secrets and sending them in three attachments to an e-mail to a man he thought was an investor in a pharmaceutical company that Jhaveri wanted to start in India with his father,
The Syracuse Post-Standard writes.
Jhaveri, who has a doctorate in chemistry from Cornell University, was a technical operations associate at Bristol-Myers and in a management training program when he decided to steal the secrets, according to prosecutors. The training program offered Jhaveri access to sensitive company info. All totaled, he took about more than 1,300 documents.
The potential loss from the info he sent was $193,000, according to Green, and the trade secrets included formulas for making a drug to treat a form of skin cancer that an expert tesitified could be worth millions of dollars. Jhaveri is not being required to pay restitution, but faces between 12 and 18 months in jail, according to prosecutors, the paper writes (back story and the FBI statement).
You may recall Jhaveri, who worked at the drugmaker since November 2007, was arrested in February after telling an FBI informant in two secretly tape-recorded conversations that he downloaded files and discussing using them to start his own company.
"I would not have left...without that, because that is the gold mine," Jhaveri told the informant in a January conversation at a Chicago restaurant. When asked how he evaded security, he said: "Yeah, but see, because I've done so many projects, I get access to all these directories." The paper obtained copies of the recordings after they were submitted as evidence in court.
Later, Jhaveri told the informant not to mention his name. "I don't want to be in the jail, you understand," Jhaveri said. During a phone call two days later, he explained he had extensive access. "Basically, if you are an employee at the Syracuse facility, the manufacturing and everything, you get all user access," Jhaveri said. "You really cleaned them out, huh?" the informant asked. And Jhaveri laughed
2 Comments
Sounds good for BMS! Other big pharma should learn some lessons from this episode. Importing unethical and cheap labor has a cost. All your background checks can't detect the stained and fraudulent heart of unscrupulous foreign labor. When you rush all the jobs to the jungles of India, while you have no control, you 've got to pay a price. Bravo to the Indian thief!!!
Corporate espionage is bad, and this guy should be prosecuted. A much larger problem, IMHO, is that of non-competition when a highly placed employee with trade secret information moves from one company to another. Most, if not all companies have non-compete agreements for R&D personnel, wherein a scientist who moves from one company to another is prohibited from working in the same research area for at least one year. Of course the problem comes in when the competiting company hires away that person specifically because of the expertise he/she possessess in that area.
In my experience companies have been far too lax in enforcing non-compete agreements with former employees. If these agreements were more rigorously enforced, there might be much less "transferability" of information from one company to another.