By: Jonathan Stempel
Reuters

Liquidnet Inc, a U.S. venue where institutions anonymously trade public stocks, was sued by Wedbush Securities Inc for allegedly stealing trade secrets to start a rival business trading shares of private companies.

Thursday's lawsuit came three days after Liquidnet hired Lou Kerner, formerly a Wedbush vice president of equity research covering social media and e-commerce, to spearhead the new business.

By: JIM SPENCER
Star Tribune

Kexue Huang worked as a biotechnologist at Cargill Inc. for little more than a year. When he left the company in 2009, he took with him a secret, or more to the point, a secret ingredient.

What Huang possessed was a valuable proprietary component for a new food product produced by the St. Paul-based agribusiness. Having that knowledge was not a crime. Sharing it was. And Huang faces up to 10 years in federal prison for passing the secret to others.

Huang, a Chinese citizen, pleaded guilty this week to trade secret theft for sharing the Cargill component. He also pleaded guilty to economic espionage for using trade secrets about insecticides stolen from an earlier employer, Dow AgroScience of Indianapolis.

By: Sue Zeidler
Reuters

A damages expert asserted Trust Company of the West (TCW) is owed $81.7 million in royalties due to trade secret theft as the high-profile civil case pitting the asset mangement firm against its former chief investment officer Jeffrey Gundlach resumed on Tuesday.

Both sides sued each other in one of the most contentious battles to grip the multitrillion bond fund world after Gundlach was fired from TCW in December 2009 and set up a rival firm, DoubleLine Capital.

In September a Los Angeles jury ordered TCW to pay Gundlach $66.7 million in wages, to be divided by Gundlach between himself and his co-defendants. Gundlach and his associates had sought hundreds of millions of dollars.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

OXFORD, Maine -- The state Gambling Control Board has ruled that releasing the names of the investors behind a casino under construction in Oxford would not be a violation of trade secrets or of the owners' privacy.

The control board ruled Tuesday that the names as well as their percentage of ownership could be made public, despite the objections of lawyers for Black Bear, who claimed disclosing the information would violate privacy.

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