A US grand jury has slapped two companies of India’s Tata group – Tata Consultancy Services and Tata America International Corporation – with a $940 million fine for stealing software.
The federal grand jury in the US State of Wisconsin ruled that the two companies must pay $240 million in a trade secret lawsuit filed against them by Epic Systems. The company has also been asked to pay another $ 700 million in punitive damages.
TCS has denied the charges and will move a higher court in the case. The corporation has claimed, in an official release, that they did not misuse any of the data downloaded from Epic Systems. It read;
TCS plans to defend its position vigorously in appeals to higher courts. TCS did not misuse or benefit from any of the said information for the development of its own hospital management system Med Mantra which was implemented for a large hospital chain in India in 2009.
The court order will not affect the TCS Q4 and FY16 financial results to be announced on Monday 18 April. The lawsuit was filed in October 2014 in US District Court in Madison.
The lawsuit was amended in January and December 2015, of “brazenly stealing the trade secrets, confidential information, documents and data” belonging to Epic.
In its lawsuit, Epic had said that TCS took that data during consultation for a customer but fraudulently used the software beyond the consulting contract – to improve their own competing product.
One TCS employee’s account, which was used in India and several US locations, downloaded 6,477 documents, according to Epic. The lawsuit said:
Rather than compete lawfully with Epic, TCS has engaged in an apparently elaborate campaign of deception to steal documents, confidential information, trade secrets, and other information and data from Epic, for the purpose of realising technical expertise developed by Epic over years of hard work and investment.
(With PTI inputs)
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