Tuesday, 11 November 2008

Former Intel Design Engineer Prosecuted for Stealing Trade Secrets

Biswamohan Pani, a former Intel design engineer, who quit the company to work for AMD has been indicted in trade secrets theft.

Pani, 33, was indicted last week by a federal grand jury in Massachusetts, U.S., on four counts of wire fraud, which were added to charges of trade-secret theft filed against the defendant in August in U.S. District Court in Boston.

The FBI in August charged Pani with theft of trade secrets after allegedly finding more than 100 pages of sensitive Intel documents, including 13 top-secret files with designs for future processor chips, inside Pani's home. The information Pani obtained reportedly was worth more than USD 1 billion in research and development costs.

Pani now faces four counts of wire fraud and one count of theft of trade secrets. He faces up to 10 years on the single count of theft of trade secrets, another 20 years for each count of wire fraud and a fine of up to USD 250,000 on each count.

According to Pani, he took the files to help his wife work on a project, who is currently employed by Intel. Intel quickly pointed out the files would have served no use for his wife.