Haldex has filed a police report due to suspected corporate espionage anddata breaches. The company says it discovered that a former employee copied large amounts of digital information, mainly of financial nature, from the company’s servers. According to Haldex, there also is evidence that information has been passed on to at least one senior employee in the financial industry.
“The potential information value in each separate of the copied files is limited. However, given the large number of documents downloaded, we cannot exclude that the potential spreading of all files together may have led to the disclosure of insider information,” said Jörgen Durban, chairman of the board of Haldex. “Therefore, Swedish Economic Crime Authority is involved in the case.”
It was earlier this summer that Haldex discovered that a person who no longer worked for the company had entered the company’s servers and downloaded a large amount of files with information that includes corporate secrets of a primarily financial nature.
In the further investigation, Haldex also found that the former employee relayed some of this confidential information to a senior employee in the financial industry.
“It is no secret that Haldex has a complicated ownership structure where changes are to be expected and if the police investigation reveals that a financial actor has actually used illegal methods to obtain information in order to gain benefits is, to say the least, worrying,” added Durban.
The company also has informed the Stockholm stock exchange monitoring unit of what has happened, as there is a risk that the information may be used incorrectly.
“It is very serious when corporate secrets concerning a listed company are handled in an unauthorized manner. This risks, among other things, disrupting the conditions for a smoothly functioning stock market, which is something that I presume all serious players would distance themselves from, ” Durban added.
Since the data breach was discovered, Haldex has changed its protection practices regarding digital material.
