Federal prosecutors of the United States charged 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from the company that he worked for – Google, against Anthony Levandowski, the former Uber executive who was in-charge of the self-driving unit of the company.

According to a law enforcement official, following the indictment, Levandowski self-surrendered to law enforcement agency.

Google had filed a lawsuit against Uber in 2017 over alleged theft of intellectual properties and Levandowski, who was a very important employee of Uber as well as Google, was right at the center of the clash between the two companies.

Google had alleged that thousands of confidential files to a personal hard drive had been downloaded by Levandowski before he had resigned from the company and that he had access to those files and information because he was one of the founding members of the self-driving car project of the US tech giant.

After leaving Google in January 2016, Levandowski had launched his own startup called Otto which was engaged in the development of technology for autonomous trucks. In that very same year, the company of Levandowski was taken over by Uber.

According to the indictment brought in the court, 14,000 files that had “critical engineering information” related to the self-driving vehicle technology and development of Google had been downloaded by him before he quit the tech company in 2016.

“All of us have the right to change jobs,” United States Attorney David L. Anderson said in a press release announcing the indictment. “None of us has the right to fill our pockets on the way out the door. Theft is not innovation.”

The “downloads at issue” had taken place when he was still employed at Google and “authorized to use the information,” said lawyers of Levandowski’s lawyers in a statement. “None of these supposedly secret files ever went to Uber or to any other company,” the counsel further added.

“Anthony is innocent, and we look forward to proving it at trial,” the lawyers said.

Uber had itself started an internal investigation into the allegations raised by the Google lawsuit and Levandowski had not been able to meet a deadline to comply with the investigation, after which he was fired from Uber in 2017. The following year, the lawsuit was settled between Uber and Waymo, Google’s self-driving unit.

The company is extending complete cooperation to the government in the investigations, a spokesperson for Uber told the media. The efforts of the federal prosecutors engaged on the case were praised by Waymo. “We have always believed competition should be fueled by innovation,” Waymo’s team said in a statement.

A sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000, in addition to restitution for each violation, will be slapped on Levandowski if he is convicted on all the charges.

(Adapted from CNN.com)

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