Ex-Intel engineer sentenced and fined $34,472 for stealing trade secrets and sharing with Microsoft; Judge says: Used those materials during negotiations ...

A former Intel engineer who illegally shared the company’s trade secrets with his new employer, Microsoft, has been sentenced to two years of probation and ordered to pay a fine of over $34,000, a report has said. The sentence was handed down last week to Varun Gupta, who worked as a product marketing engineer for Intel for nearly a decade. He was fired from his senior position at Microsoft after his actions came to light.

According to Assistant US Attorney William Narus, Gupta copied thousands of confidential files from his Intel computer onto a portable hard drive before leaving the company in 2020, as per a report in Oregon Live.

He then “repeatedly accessed those documents” and used them to represent Microsoft in contract negotiations with his former employer, specifically on a deal related to computer processors, the report added.

“Not only did the defendant take proprietary materials with him, he also used those materials during negotiations against his prior employer,” Narus said in a sentencing memo. One of the documents shared was a PowerPoint presentation outlining Intel's pricing strategy with another major customer.

What the sentencing memo on the former Intel engineer said
In a sentencing memo, Narus argued for an eight-month prison term, emphasising the need to deter such behavior in an industry with high employee turnover.

“Not only did the defendant take proprietary materials with him, he also used those materials during negotiations against his prior employer,” Narus wrote.

Gupta’s defense attorney, David Angeli, countered that Gupta had already suffered a significant and lasting punishment. Angeli noted that his client had already lost the high-level position he worked years to achieve, settled a civil lawsuit with Intel for $40,000, and experienced a permanently damaged reputation that effectively ended his career in the tech sector.

In a prepared statement to the court, Gupta apologised to both Intel and Microsoft, as well as the government, for the resources spent “because of my bad decision.”

He spoke of his daily struggle with questions about his future and his "legacy" as he works to rebuild his life in a new country. After leaving the tech industry, Gupta relocated his family to France and is now studying vineyard management, with aspirations of working in the wine industry.