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BL Premium reports that Pilog, a global data management group, has accused Glencore of poaching its senior employees to replicate its business model and steal its intellectual property.
Pilog, which lists companies such as Harmony, Impala Platinum, BHP Billiton, Vedanta and Xtrata as clients, approached the North Gauteng High Court in a bid to bar its former employees for working for Glencore for a period of a year, saying their continued employment with the Swiss commodities giant exposed it trade secrets. The company had a consultancy services agreement with Glencore to perform specialised data cleansing and data standardisation processes for the mining house. The contract has since lapsed. Glencore embarked on a process to hire more employees due to the business decision to expand its own internal cataloguing department. This saw it hire former Pilog employees Joao Filipe Dos Reis, Karl van Wyngaard and Tshimbalanga Mpindu. Another former Pilog employee, Marius Rautenbach, works for a company doing work for Glencore. Pilog argued in its court papers that Glencore intentionally planned to poach its ex-employees for the purposes of developing its business system. Glencore denied the allegation and said Pilog’s ex-employees were recruited through independent and transparent processes. Glencore also said in its court papers said it had no intention of using Pilog’s software, ontology or taxonomy and had employed the ex-employees for their skill set only. It said it still outsourced the bulk data cleansing and standardisation services, now to Prospecta. Judge Harshila Kooverjie dismissed Pilog’s application and said: “Pilog, during the hearing, merely advanced an argument that the employees’ skill set and know-how are integrally linked to the employer’s proprietary interest without illustrating how such skill set is linked to Pilog’s confidential business system.”
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Kabelo Khumalo at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)
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