Ketankumar Maniar could go to jail for 10 years.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: An Indian-origin man in New Jersey has pleaded guilty to charges of stealing confidential trade secrets while employed as an engineer at a medical technology firm.
Thirty-seven year-old Ketankumar Maniar was charged with two criminal counts, theft and attempted theft of trade secrets, both of which he admitted his guilt to. As a result, Maniar is now facing up to a full decade in prison, along with a $250,000 fine, for his efforts to store privileged documents on his own devices.
According to the Department of Justice, Maniar worked for a company called Becton, Dickinson, and Co., based in Franklin Lakes, NJ, from 2012-2013. The company specializes in medical technology and supplies, and Maniar worked there as an engineer.
Prosecutors allege that Maniar spent his final three weeks on the job storing up to 8,000 documents that were the property of Becton, Dickinson, and Co., stealing the plans for a injection device that a person can use to deliver a drug into their own system.
During his time with the company, Maniar was a staff engineer in a department that work specifically in creating pen injectors and syringes, reports the local Cliff View Pilot. In the three weeks leading up to his resignation from the company in May, Maniar used thumb drives and external hard drives to store data report, diagrams, invoices, production and delivery schedules, and a host of other files related to the aforementioned injection device.
Maniar also used his personal email address to send certain documents over the Internet. Â The day before he resigned from the company, he took sick, apparently in order to transfer everything he had stolen into a centralized location. After that, Maniar planned to leave the country, but was arrested by federal agents in June, before he could actually step on a plane.
Law enforcement agents seized several incriminating objects from Maniar at the time of his arrest, including a hard drive that contained the bulk of his stolen information. An actual value has not been put on the information that Maniar stole, but proprietary medical technology can be a rather lucrative business.
The motive behind the theft is not yet known, however, aside from the obvious incentive of simple personal gain by selling the secrets to a competing company. Maniar may have even intended to sell them to a company overseas. He previously worked for a firm called C.R. Bard, based in Murray Hills, NJ, from 2004-2011, but they have not been implicated in the case.
Maniar will be sentenced on September 23.