High Court rules exec breached contractual, equitable duties of confidentiality
A senior executive of a Singapore-based fund management company has been sued by his employer for accessing and downloading sensitive company documents before he resigned.
Rajan Sunil Kumar was the Head of Investor Relations at Hayate Partners Pte Ltd from December 2019 until his resignation in December 2021.
Hayate took Kumar to court alleging that he downloaded thousands of confidential files from the company's Google Drive onto his personal devices for non-work-related purposes.
According to Hayate, they discovered the download after carrying out an audit of his IT activities as part of the company's usual protocol upon the resignation of an employee.
Their audit discovered that there were 6,274 instances of downloads by Kumar from the company's Google Drive, including 4,533 downloads that occurred on December 8, 2021, just before he tendered his resignation.
The company also discovered that Kumar viewed and/or downloaded files from their Google Drive on December 20, and then downloaded an entire Skype chat log on his work account on December 21, a day before his last day.
Hayate told the court that Kumar's downloads consist of documents in six broad categories:
According to Hayate, Kumar's actions violated both the terms of his employment contract and his duty of confidentiality under equity law.
Kumar, however, denied the allegations and claimed that he deleted all documents that he downloaded before the termination of his employment.
The former senior exec defended that he only downloaded all the documents from the company's Google Drive in order to search for the payslips that he was not provided with.
On the December 20 downloads, he claimed that he downloaded some of the documents in the claimant's Google Drive into the Dell laptop to ensure a smooth transition upon the termination of his employment.
On the Skype chat log, Kumar said he downloaded them as evidence for complaints he intended to make regarding the company's non-provision of payslips and to show the events that led to his resignation.
The Singapore High Court ruled in favour of Hayate, finding that Kumar breached both his contractual and equitable duties of confidentiality.
"I find that it is more likely than not that the defendant retained the confidential documents in his personal devices beyond the last day of his employment," the court decided.
"As he failed to deliver up these documents, which constitute 'computer material' and 'information relating to the business of [the claimant]' upon the termination of his employment, I find him to be in breach of cl 6 of the Letter of Appointment."
While the court determined that Kumar had not explicitly violated the terms of his contract by downloading confidential information for non-work-related purposes during his employment, it found that he breached his obligations by retaining the information beyond his resignation.
Although Kumar's defence — that he downloaded the documents to find missing payslips — was considered, the court rejected it.
"I am unable to conclude that the defendant has successfully rebutted the presumption that his conscience was affected when he accessed, downloaded, and retained the various documents from the claimant's Google Drive."
The court ordered the deletion of the Google Drive cache files retained on Kumar's Macbook resulting from the December 8 downloads.
"This is to be done under the supervision of the claimant and/or its forensic expert and solicitors," the court said.
"Such an order would not compel the surrender of any materials which the defendant is entitled to retain possession of, and it should eliminate once and for all any possibility of the defendant disclosing or using the information contained in those cache files for any purpose."
