Image via CrunchBaseBoth eBay and its online payment partner, PayPal Inc., collaboratively sued Google Inc. and its two executives, on Thursday. The lawsuit claims that these executives stole trade secrets and confidential information of Paypal and eBay, related to mobile payment systems, and illegally passed it on to Google. The alleged executives of Google are Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius, who are both former employees of PayPal and eBay, and are also responsible for this new launch of Google on Thursday. This new service of Google’s mobile payment system is launched in collaboration with MasterCard, Citigroup and Sprint.
The lawsuit points out that this battle of launching a better and early mobile payment system is between all the companies, which are attempting to have most of the predicted opportunity of $1 trillion turnover in mobile payments. The idea is to present mobile phones as a digital personal wallet. The filings of eBay mention that Bedier worked has been working at PayPal for nine years, specifically as the V.P. of ‘mobile and new ventures,’ he was hired by Google very recently on 24th of January, 2011. Meanwhile, Tilenius was employed at eBay from 2001 to October 2009 and even served as a consultant afterwards till March 2010. The lawsuit points out Tilenius also joined Google just last year in February 2010 as V.P. of e-commerce.
Bedier has been accused of having "misappropriated PayPal trade secrets by disclosing them within Google and to major retailers." While it accuses Tilenius of wrongly recruiting Bedier, which in essence broke a legal agreement he had signed with eBay in advance. Furthermore, the report states that Bedier also tried to recruit more colleagues of his at PayPal, to leave PayPal and join him at Google. It even declared that Bedier, during his period at PayPal, was the senior executive and representative of PayPal, for the negotiations with Google to create PayPal’s mobile payment system on Android.
Moreover, it asserts that before leaving PayPal Bedier suspiciously accumulated latest confidential documents of PayPal's mobile payment plans to his personal computer just before quitting PayPal for Google. The lawsuit stated that "By hiring Bedier, with his trade secret knowledge of PayPal's plans and understanding of Google's weaknesses as viewed by the industry leader (PayPal), Google bought the most comprehensive and sophisticated critique of its own problems available."
According to the spokesperson of Google Inc., Aaron Zamost, it hadn’t received any document informing about the complaint, hence he was not able to comment on the matter.
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