Bombardier suing Mitsubishi over trade secrets

Bombardier is suing MONTREAL Mitsubishi Aircraft in the United States over alleged trade secret misappropriation. The Quebec aerospace company alleges some of its own former employees passed on documents containing trade secrets to Mitsubishi before going to work for the company. The 92-page legal complaint filed in a Seattle court Friday also targets Aerospace Testing Engineering & Certification (AeroTEC), which backs the Japanese multinational in developing its MRJ airline, and several ex-Bombardier staff. None of the allegations contained in the court documents has been proven in court. A Mitsubishi spokesman says the allegations are unfounded and the company says it will prove so in court. AeroTEC did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday. Bombardier’s CEO intervened twice over the past two years to try to resolve the dispute. In a letter sent Jan. 27, 2017, Alain Bellemare warned Mitsubishi Heavy Industries board chairman Hideaki Omiya that the practices of subsidiary Mitsubishi Aircraft were causing “significant harm” to Bombardier. Bellemare stressed that his team had been ordered to take “all necessary actions to ensure the protection of the intellectual property (of the company) and its know-how.” Bombardier alleges Mitsubishi Aircraft and AeroTEC recruited at least 92 of its former staff from Canada and the U.S. The ex-workers named in the suit allegedly forwarded documents on the certification process to Transport Canada and its U.S. counterpart, the Federal Aviation Administration. Bombardier recently went through the process for the C Series program, later rebranded A220 after Airbus took a majority stake in the program. Bombardier alleges that Mitsubishi specifically recruited staff who had experience with the certification process and broke the law when it used confidential documents obtained from them in order to accelerate the timelines for its own MRJ airline. Bombardier is seeking unspecified financial damages and an injunction barring Mitsubishi Aircraft and AeroTEC from using confidential information allegedly obtained from ex-employees.