A court in the United States has slashed by over half the amount it had earlier fined Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services for allegedly stealing healthcare-related software code from American firm Epic Systems, TCS said on Sunday. The company will now have to pay a fine of $420 million (around Rs 2,742 crore), it said in an exchange filing.
In April 2016, the Western District Court of Wisconsin had imposed a fine of $940 million (around Rs 6,136 crore) on TCS in the lawsuit. The Tata Group company had then denied the charges and said it would appeal against the verdict in higher courts.
On Sunday, the Indian tech giant said the reduced damages are not supported by evidence, and it will contest the fine again. TCS repeated its earlier stance that it “did not misuse or derive any benefit” from downloaded documents from the user web portal of Epic System.
In 2016, the jury had held TCS guilty of stealing trade secrets, confidential information, documents and data from the complainant. It had asked the Mumbai-based firm to pay $240 million (around Rs 1,566 crore) for intellectual property infringement, and $700 million (approximately Rs 4570 crore) for punitive damages.
In a lawsuit filed in October 2014, Epic Systems said it had “recently learned from an informant” that TCS employees had been “fraudulently accessing” Epic’s software beyond what the consulting contract required and using it to improve their own competing product. They claimed that an account belonging to a TCS employee had downloaded 6,477 documents. The account was allegedly used from India and the US.
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