Fired engineer claims BD sparked CareFusion recalls before acquisition

October 1, 2019 By Nancy Crotti Leave a Comment

The BD R&D engineer whom federal prosecutors have accused of stealing trade secrets claims the company is trying to silence him about its own alleged legal and regulatory violations.

Minh Quang Hoang worked at BD’s Sandy, Utah, facility from 1988 until he was fired in August 2015. A superceding indictment charges Hoang with 11 counts of stealing trade secrets related to BD alcohol swab packaging, specifications for foam used to protect BD needleless connector caps, specs and usage information for an unnamed polymer, plans for antimicrobial dressings, market research for device disinfection, and more.

In a motion to dismiss filed yesterday, Hoang contends that a new supervisor from CareFusion, which BD acquired for $12.2 billion in 2015, retaliated against Hoang for his allegedly BD-sanctioned pre-merger work digging up regulatory violations on CareFusion products. Those violations prompted “large-scale recalls on CareFusion products causing CareFusion revenues to drop substantially,” the motion says.

Hoang maintains that a criminal conviction would benefit BD and discredit any revelations about the company. BD attorneys went so far as to draft proposed indictments, proposed complaints, and proposed search warrants for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 2016, after prosecutors dismissed a previous trade secrets case against Hoang, the motion says. Several portions of the motion pertaining to Hoang’s work for BD are redacted.

A BD spokesman said the company would not comment on the federal government’s case “other than to say the statements made by the criminal defendant pertaining to BD are completely without merit.”

Hoang claims that he was only backing up the BD information the government is accusing him of stealing.

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