Former HP VP charged with stealing IBM trade secrets

July 3rd, 2008 by

The printer market isn’t exactly full of the most intersting news, but it’s still big money, and big money tends to bring out the worst in people — like former HP VP Atul Malhotra, who was just charged with stealing trade secrets from his former employer IBM and emailing them to other HP execs. Apparently Malhotra requested some confidential sales data two months before he went from the three-letter company to the two-letter one, and when he got there he hit up some other senior execs with the files — marking the subject line “For Your Eyes Only.” Yeah, that’s an effective way to keep a lid on things. Malhotra was fired from HP in 2006, so all this went down some time ago, and HP says it actually conducted an internal investigation about the matter before firing Malhotra and reporting the theft to both IBM and the authorities. Sure, sure — but we’ll know what’s up when the next HP AIO is running a Cell chip.