BUJA. According to the court of Udine, there was the revelation of industrial secrets, but only one of the two former employees passed under a new employer and the legal representative of the company that would have benefited from that information committed it. Thus ended, with the conviction of Nicola Franceschinis and Sandro Miconi, both 53-year-olds from Buja, to 10 months’ imprisonment, suspended with parole, the trial resulting from the complaint that Attimis’s “Eurolls spa” filed in 2017 against the ” Promostar srl ”of Buja, its competitor in the construction and sale of industrial machinery.
The sentence was issued yesterday by the single judge of the court of Udine, Giulia Pussini, against the request of 1 year and 8 months each advanced at the last hearing by the public prosecutor. The third accused, Lorenzo Zontone, 45, from Martignacco, a colleague of Franceschinis, was acquitted “for not having committed the crime”, to whom the judge also decided to grant the benefit of not being mentioned. But who, together with Miconi, that is the president of Promostar, will have to compensate the damages (to be liquidated in separate proceedings) to Eurolls, which formed a civil action with the lawyer Maurizio Miculan. On the other hand, the further crime of embezzlement of designs owned by Attimis’ company, which the deputy prosecutor Giorgio Milillo, owner of the file, had challenged only two former employees, had been extinguished.
It was precisely the discovery in Franceschinis’ computer of drawings of the projects for a machine called lombricone, a horizontal devolver designed by Eurolls, during a search by the Guardia di Finanza, that led the prosecutor to assume that the two employees – design technician since 2004 at his resignation in 2013, the first, and commercial technician from 2007 to his resignation in 2010, the second – had revealed and used the news on the machinery to the advantage of Promostar.
Thesis that the defense, represented by the lawyers Pierenrico Scalettaris (for Franceschinis and Zoncone) and Stefano Buonocore (for Miconi), firmly rejected, arguing that there was no industrial secret in the donor, as it has been on the market for over twenty years and known to all, and how it was therefore sufficient to look at any one to understand how it worked (the so-called reverse engineering).
During the hearing, moreover, the defense had highlighted how the expert opinion of the prosecutor’s technical consultant had not analyzed the drawings seized by Promostar, but those contained in an anonymous envelope arrived from Eurolls and that the respective clients disavowed, because they were different. The appeal is practically discounted.