Pharma Company Vice President Held For Stealing Company’s Secrets To Launch His Start-Up

MUMBAI: A pharmaceutical company’s senior executive was arrested for allegedly stealing business secrets, including a client list, and using the information to launch his startup.

According to cyber police officials, the accused, Satyen Roy (45), who had joined the medical equipment manufacturing firm as vice-president (sales), stole its product blueprint and client database and quit the company within seven months of joining it. Roy, who had been on the run, was recently arrested from a hotel in Ahmedabad, where he was staying with his wife and children.

The police said they are looking for two other employees of the pharma company— Roy’s secretary and his sales manager—who are suspected of conspiring with Roy by assisting him in obtaining blueprints for various departments of the company.

Officials said Roy fled to different cities before finally getting caught in Ahmedabad. “He had flown to Kolkata, then to Uttar Pradesh and other places anticipating trouble with the law,” an official said. After his location was traced to Gujarat, officials used the Gujarat police’s online database of hotel guests to pin him down to the hotel.

He allegedly attempted to tarnish the pharma company’s name after stealing its secrets. “To entice customers, he told them that the company was cutting ‘huge profits by selling products at very exorbitant prices. He offered to sell the same products at a lower price,” the official stated. The pharma company’s business in that particular segment had almost completely dried up. It used to be worth a few crores, but it has now almost dwindled to nothing.

According to the police, Roy, whose monthly cost to the pharma company was Rs 4 lakh, had also overstepped his authority by convening meetings with heads of various departments as well as other senior employees.

“This was done to obtain confidential business strategy as well as to gain the trust of the company’s employees before absorbing them into his own start-up,” said a senior official from the cyber crime police station.

Roy allegedly stopped reporting to work on May 9 after allegedly stealing the company’s sales policy format, product print, report format, vendors, and client database. According to the complaint filed by the company’s vice-president (administration), Vikas Upadhayay, “he tendered his resignation on June 2.”

Roy, who has been charged with ‘criminal breach of trust,’ appeared in Esplanade Court on Friday and was remanded in police custody until July 20.