Credit Suisse, the second-largest Swiss bank accused a former vice president for emerging markets, Agostina Pechi, who has recently started a job at the U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs, of trade secrets theft. Credit Suisse has filed a complaint in a Manhattan court accusing its former employee of stealing information in an attempt to get new customers for Goldman Sachs.
In February and March, Pechi secretly sent emails with customer lists and other confidential banking information from her work email account to her personal account and printed important documents relating to transactions, late at night, while she was supposed to be on vacation, says the complaint filed on May 3 by Credit Suisse.
Pechi made $950,000 last year and lives in New York. She resigned from Credit Suisse on April 2, informing the Swiss bank that she accepted a job at Goldman Sachs in New York.
“Pechi decided to steal confidential Credit Suisse information and contacts that she had learned during the course of her employment for Credit Suisse. She plans to use the data to compete with Credit Suisse, and intends to provide this information to her new employer to specifically target Credit Suisse’s clients,” according to the complaint.
“There is no question that the databases that Pechi mailed to herself were and are the property of Credit Suisse, developed by Credit Suisse using its own resources,” reads the complaint.
Pechi allegedly had 60 e-mail messages in her personal account related to her job at Credit Suisse. She agreed to let investigators check them, but “Less than 24 hours later, the e-mails had been deleted from Pechi’s personal e-mail account and could not be recovered, despite the fact that Pechi was aware that Credit Suisse’s investigators had returned solely to extract these 60 emails,” the Swiss bank claims.
A spokesman for Goldman Sachs declined to comment, and Pechi could not be reached.
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