This goes beyond the typical story of a CEO fudging the financial numbers.
Chip Company Suing Ex-CEO(Los Angeles Business) International Rectifier Corp. has dodged a hostile takeover and weathered an accounting scandal. Now the El Segundo maker of power management chips is going to court with its former chief executive - the son of the company's founder - accusing him of stealing trade secrets.
The tension reached a critical point in September, when International Rectifier filed a federal suit accusing Alexander Lidow of engaging in an ongoing criminal enterprise - also known as a racketeer influenced and corrupt organization, or Rico - by stealing information, intellectual property and technology related to the company's secret research on a superconducting material that could become the future of semiconductor power management technology. A key hearing in the case is scheduled for Feb. 2.
The suit alleges that Lidow devised a plan to steal IR's trade secrets, and then recruited six former IR researchers and sales executives to help him launch a competing company, which is currently using the stolen research to develop its own products from the special material, called gallium nitride.
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