Inside job: Did Houston firm swipe trade secrets?

Multinational materials processing company Saint-Gobain claims a Houston competitor so coveted an advanced radiation detection technology that it was willing to recruit employees to steal trade secrets. Now Saint-Gobain, based in France, is suing Centronic LLC and two former Saint-Gobain employees, alleging they illegally brought proprietary information with them when they went to work for Centronic.

Saint-Gobain filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas against Kyriakos Tsorbatzoglou, its former director of engineering, and Dora Pineda, former shipping/receiving coordinator. The suit also names Centronic as a defendant.

Saint-Gobain claims that Centronic induced Tsorbatzoglou and Pineda to access Saint-Gobain’s password-protected computer servers, which contained trade secrets and other confidential information in anticipation of working for Centronic. They allegedly later provided the information to Centronic.

In addition to misappropriation of trade secrets and confidential proprietary information, Saint-Gobain is suing for breach of fiduciary duty and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act.