Motorola expands trade secrets lawsuit to include Huawei

Motorola Inc. has amended a lawsuit against Lemko Corp. and 14 individual defendants to include Huawei Technlologies Co. Ltd., charging the company with actual or threatened misappropriation of trade secrets.
The case, originally filed in 2008, alleges that Hanjuan Jin and other defendants were employed by Motorola and simultaneously employed by Lemko from 2004 to about 2007. In 2005, Motorola said Jin transferred proprietary information including Motorola source code from Motorola to her personal e-mail account and later to Lemko. Jin, according to the lawsuit, was stopped at O’Hare International Airport on Feb. 28, 2007, with $30,000 cash and more than 1,000 electronic and paper documents that Motorola alleges were Motorola property, where she was stopped by U.S. Customs officials. Jin, according to the lawsuit, is married to Shawoei Pan, who allegedly met with Huawei officials in the early 2000s, when he was employed by Motorola.
Motorola is alleging a “secret relationship” between Lemko and Huawei and that both companies have products that are based on Motorola’s SC300 microcell base station transceiver. Lemko has since filed a countersuit.
“Huawei, which has an agreement with Motorola allowing that company to resell Huawei’s wireless equipment, has only recently learned of the amended Motorola complaint. Based on our review of the complaint so far, the complaint is groundless and utterly without merit,” the company said. “Huawei has no relationship with Lemko, other than a reseller agreement. Huawei will vigorously defend itself against baseless allegations. Moreover, as an active and significant player in global standards-setting bodies, Huawei has great respect for the rights of intellectual property holders, and will with equal vigor protect its own hard-earned intellectual property rights.”