Boeing Finds More Possible Misdeeds
Boeing Co., already under investigation for possible corporate espionage, has informed the Air Force of another case in which one of its employees may have improperly possessed a rival company’s proprietary documents.
But because of a five-year statute of limitations, federal investigators are unlikely to focus on those documents, which date from the early 1990s, as they continue their probe, legal experts said.
The latest disclosure comes as investigators examine two separate instances of Boeing employees accused of illicitly obtaining trade secrets from rival Lockheed Martin Corp. and then using them to win multibillion-dollar contracts for rockets.
Two former employees who worked at Boeing’s Huntington Beach facility have been criminally charged and the Pentagon last summer stripped Boeing of about $1 billion in rocket contracts and suspended it from bidding on future military rocket launch contracts.
Boeing acknowledged last week that federal investigators also were looking into the possibility that the company used “nonpublic” Lockheed information to win a separate NASA rocket contract.
But the company did not disclose at that time that its own internal investigators had found a third case of potential document pilfering.
In an April letter to the Air Force, Boeing said it recently discovered that a mid-level manager who prepared cost estimates of competitors’ bids possessed proprietary documents from Martin Marietta, a Lockheed Martin predecessor.
The employee, Matthew Jew, resigned last month and has since been cooperating with investigators. Jew, who couldn’t be reach for comment, prepared cost estimates on all three rocket contracts.
Boeing executives said Thursday that the documents did not factor into the company’s own pricing as it competed against Martin Marietta for the $1-billion rocket contract in the early 1990s.
The contract was awarded to Boeing.
The Air Force and the Justice Department, citing the ongoing nature of the investigation, declined to comment on the latest disclosure.
