David Yen Lee, a former technical director for Valspar, was sentenced this week to 15 months in prison for stealing an estimated $20 million in trade secrets after accepting a position with a competitor. Lee pleaded guilty in September to charges that he used his credentials on Valspar's secure network to access and download data including chemical formulas, sales and cost data, product research and marketing data.
According to the Chicago Office of the FBI:
Lee admitted that between September 2008 and February 2009, he had negotiated employment with Nippon Paint, located in Shanghai, China. On Feb. 27, 2009, Lee accepted employment with Nippon as vice president of technology and administrator of research and development beginning on April 1, 2009, in Shanghai. Lee was scheduled to fly from Chicago to Shanghai on March 27, 2009. He did not inform Valspar that he had accepted a job at Nippon until he resigned on March 16, 2009.
At Valspar, Lee’s duties included scouting new paint technologies, coordinating with other paint laboratories, coordinating staffing and projects with Huarun Limited, a Valspar subsidiary located in China, and overseeing Valspar’s technical service group, which conducted experiments for paint coloring.
Between November 2008 and March 2009, Lee downloaded technical documents and materials belonging to Valspar, including the paint formula batch tickets. He further copied certain downloaded files to external thumb drives to store the data, knowing that he intended to use the confidential information belong to Valspar for his own benefit. The total value of the trade secret information Lee took was estimated at between $7 million and $20 million. There was no evidence that he actually disclosed any of the stolen trade secrets.
In addition, Lee has been ordered to pay $30,975 in restitution to cover the expenses of Valspar's internal investigation.
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