Bristol-Myers-Squibb Employee Charged with Extensive Trade Secret Theft

ABC News is reporting that Shalin Jhaveri, 29, of Syracuse, was charged in U.S. District Court with stealing trade secrets and proprietary information from the New York-based company while taking part in a management training program. He was fired Tuesday.

Employed on an immigrant worker's visa, Jhaveri had been a technical operations associate at Bristol since November 2007. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The thefts of "hundreds of the company's standard operating procedures" took place over an extended period, "but the most active period was in the last few weeks," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Green. According to United States Attorney Richard Hartunian, Jhaveri stole the trade secrets so he could establish a pharmaceutical firm in India that would compete with Bristol-Myers-Squibb in various markets around the world. Jhaveri, a native of India, was a Technical Operations Associate with Bristol-Myers-Squibb for a little over two years until he was fired.

"Both the company and law enforcement have been aware of his activities for the past several weeks," he added.

The monetary value of the documents, which were mainly in electronic form, was not disclosed.

In the training program, Jhaveri was rotated through various departments, and the department he was in most recently was one of the more sensitive areas of the company, Green said.