Agencies - Abu Dhabi
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The US Justice Department on Tuesday filed a criminal indictment against Anthony Lewandowski, a former Google engineer, including dozens of charges of stealing important information.
The prosecutor revealed 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of Google's trade secrets, and later sold to Uber, amid a frantic race between the two companies to win the largest share of the market for self-driving cars.
Lewandowski was working on Google's self-driving project, which later became known as WIMO, but according to the indictment, he left the company in 2016 to launch his own self-driving truck company, which Uber later acquired.
According to the indictment, in the months before his departure, Lewandowski uploaded thousands of classified files containing "important engineering information about devices used in autonomous vehicles" and transferring files to a personal laptop.
US Attorney David L. Anderson said both Google and Uber had cooperated with government officials, citing continuing investigations.
Wimo filed a lawsuit against Uber in February 2017, claiming that three-dimensional sensor drawings of the Uber self-driving car project revealed a "striking similarity" with its own designs. Ordinary breakthrough to the design server and Emo then hide its activities, "after downloading more than 14 thousand secret files.
In a compromise between the two parties in 2018, Uber agreed to pay about $ 245 million to WIMO.
In response to the new charges, Miles Ehrlich and Lewandowski's lawyer, Ismail Ramzi, said in a statement that the indictment "is reconsidering its credibility claims already in a civil case that settled more than a year and a half ago. None of these presumed confidential files went to Uber or any other company. "