The former director of technology for aged care services provider Mirus Australia has been found guilty of contempt in the NSW Supreme Court after deleting confidential information from his laptop.
Mirus works with aged care organisation to assess funding requirements and manage revenue using a proprietary cloud-based analytics tool. Its core data capture tool collects Medicare information from customers.
Nicholas Gage resigned from his role as Mirus CIO in 13 July 2015, and his employment ended the following month on 7 August. During this time, it was alleged that Gage copied confidential information from Mirus to his personal Google Drive.
Mirus claimed the information copied included the company's entire back-end IP, the entire CRM database, balance sheets and the Medicare data capture tool.
Gage and another former Mirus employee attempted to set up a competing aged care business after their employment ended. After learning about the new business, Mirus informed Gage he was in breach of his contract and demanded the return of all confidential information he retained from Mirus.
Mirus began legal proceedings against Gage on 7 September 2015 and was ordered to deliver to the court all computers, media, USB storage and other storage devices containing Mirus confidential information.
However, the court found that Gage deleted information from his laptop and cloud storage accounts relevant to Mirus’ court action soon after.
Justice Julie Wards said Gage's conduct was an abuse of process of the court by intentionally deleting documents relevant to litigation in order to prevent them from being located.
"There is no room for doubt, on the expert evidence, that between 6.33pm and 7.19pm on 7 September 2015 the SDELETE function was run on the Surface Pro [laptop]," Ward said.
Gage's sentencing is scheduled for 13 December. He was ordered to pay Mirus' costs on an indemnity basis.
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
