HP Exec: Company Spied on Dell

A former HP executive has accused the company of snooping on Dell's printer business, as well as claiming he was the target of pretexting similar to the case that nearly brought the company to its knees last year.

The claims were made in a countersuit filed by Karl Kamb, Jr., who along with four others were fired and sued by HP for attempting to start their own flat-panel TV business when they were to be developing the company's own models. The suit asked for $100 million in damages.

Kamb's countersuit, filed last Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, claims he was the target of pretexting while the company attempted to investigate its suspicions against them. He also said he'd been tasked by HP to spy on Dell's printer plans.

Dell had been a former customer of the company, but decided to strike out on its own and started its own printer business in 2003. According to Kamb's complaint, he hired former Dell executive Katsumi Ilzuka who gathered information on his former company's planned launch.

HP erroneously assumed that Kamb was misappropriating funds for his alleged flat-screen TV business and fired him without severance pay. The company claims that Kamb used HP trade secrets for his planned business, which it first found out about after being dragged into Kamb's divorce from his wife, who was also trying to find out information on his venture.

In addition to the four employees sued, HP also filed claims against two contractors, one of them being Ilzuka. However, Kamb claims that the company went two far and invaded his privacy.

This could be the last public information on the case: following some public attention on the case, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Schneider dismissed Kamb's initial claim on Wednesday and ordered him to refile under seal. By doing so, court documents would no longer be public.

In addition, Schneider has placed a gag order on those involved that would prevent discussion of the allegations in the counterclaim from being discussed in the media.

However, before the gag order was handed down, HP responded to the claims within in a prepared statement. "This counterclaim is wholly without merit," it said. "It's a blatant attempt to delay the prosecution of the original case against the persons filing the counterclaim."

"The claim that pretexting was involved in this investigation is, to the best of our knowledge, patently untrue. Furthermore, as we've said in the past, HP strongly rejects such methods of investigation and has said that those methods will not again be employed on behalf of the company," the company continued.

There is some evidence that Kamb's claims may be true. In interviews with former ethics officer Kevin Hunsaker by lawyers hired by HP to investigate the original pretexting case, it was disclosed that the company first used pretexting in July 2005 to look up phone records of an individual "going through a messy divorce."

Kamb's lawyers filed that document with the countersuit claim. Both the lawyer for Kamb and Ilzuka, as well as Dell, declined to comment on the case publicly.