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Pellerey, a French national and a senior engineer earning 51,000 pounds a year at Dyson’s headquarters in Wiltshire, U.K., accepted a job from Tesla in March 2015, but didn’t immediately tell Dyson because the offer was conditional on getting a visa to work in the U.S., according to the court ruling released this week.
In May, with the visa still not approved, he was called into a secret meeting with two colleagues and told that James Dyson wanted the company to develop an electric car. They would be drafted to work on the confidential project, known only as “Project E.” The three were told to take their laptops and move to a secure area within the research department.
‘A Little Uncomfortable’
“I felt a little uncomfortable about being involved in that project, as I knew I would be involved with electric vehicles at Tesla,” Pellerey later told the court in a closed hearing, recounted in the court ruling.
But, he said, he was torn. If he’d come clean, he feared that “it would have compromised my future prospects at Dyson should Tesla have not confirmed an unconditional job offer with me.” And he said the work he was involved in at Dyson was different from the work he was going to do at Tesla. So, he kept quiet.
In June, however, Tesla offered him a job in Europe, which avoided the visa difficulties, and he told Dyson he was leaving. When he did that, Dyson’s lawyers told him in a letter that he couldn’t work for Tesla for 12 months because “your proposed new employer is engaged in the same type of business as the business comprised in Project E.” Dyson’s electric car project was described as “highly sensitive and confidential.”
But Pellerey told Tesla’s associate general counsel Yusuf Mohamed about the letter. When Mohamed asked to see the document, Pellerey said he wasn’t sure he could share it because it was marked confidential.
No Twitter
“Yes, just don’t put it on Twitter,” Mohamed replied, according to the court judgment. Mohamed said he needed it “to carry out our indemnity obligations” because Tesla was agreeing to cover Pellerey’s costs in a legal battle with Dyson.
Pellerey later told the court that he thought Mohamed would handle it confidentially because he was a lawyer -- an explanation that a judge accepted while saying it “seems obviously inaccurate to a lawyer.”
“The disclosure of that letter to Mr. Mohamed told him, a member of the outside world, that DTL [Dyson] was working on an electric car,” Judge Keith Lindblom ruled in February 2016. “That was just the type of disclosure that the Project E team had had impressed upon it that it must not make.”
Mohamed said in a letter to Pellerey’s solicitors in September 2015 he had not shared the letter with anyone at Tesla. But, another London judge, Richard Snowden, said in his October 2015 ruling that “Tesla must by now have deduced that Dyson is working on an electric car project.”
“It does not require a great deal of imagination to come to the conclusion that DTL would not be going to such trouble if the only confidential information he possessed related to vacuum cleaners and hand dryers,” Judge Snowden said in the October 2015 ruling.
Dyson won the injunction preventing Pellerey from working at Tesla for nine months, but lost a bid for a second one stopping him from using its confidential information. Judge Snowden ruled in October 2015 that there was “no basis” for the second injunction because the engineer would not immediately be working on electric cars, though he said a court might have to look at that again if Pellerey started working for a car manufacturer. Pellerey “does not intend deliberately to disclose details of Project E to any third party,” the judge ruled.
Court hearings in the case were held in secret in 2015, so that the media couldn’t find out that Dyson was planning an electric car -- a move that the company made public in September. Pellerey started working at Tesla in June 2016 and still works there now, according to his LinkedIn profile.