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THEFT OF EMPLOYER'S CON-FIDENTIAL INFORMATION IS BREACH OF FIDUCIARY DUTY
To prevent employees from disclosing confi-dential company information after leaving em-ployment, many enterprises include non-disclosure and non-competition clauses in employment contracts, in order to protect the company interests. However, what force such clauses have is far from undisputed in practice.
In a recent case, an employee of a real estate agency, in order to gather information needed to start his own business after leaving the agency, photocopied commercially valuable information, including data on the company trading area col-lected and analyzed by the company, detailed records of the company commercial activities, and records of sales concluded by customers. He subsequently used the above information in set-ting up business on his own account. The Tai-wan High Court ruled in a 2000 criminal appeal in the case that the employee had sought to gain illegal benefit for himself while conducting af-fairs for his pervious employers, by acting in breach of his duties in a way harmful to the in-terests of his previous employer. This consti-tuted an offence of breach of fiduciary duty un-der Article 342 of the Criminal Code.