Is this inside information?

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 361.

Exercise 14. When and if you get employed by a foreign company you will have to sign a Contract of Employment which may include a clause on confidential information. Read an example of such a clause very carefully.

(6) CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION AND DATA

1.1. During an Employee's term of office as stipulated in the present agreement and hereinafter, he or she must not: (1) divulge or consciously permit an outside party access to the Company's Commercial secret and any other information relevant to the Company's activities and financial circumstances (bargains, operations or deeds of the Company, the Company's know-how or the Company's secret technologies) which pertain to all items, products and services provided by the Company (the “Confidential Information”); (2) to utilize or attempt to utilize, in any manner, the said Commercial Information in his or her own interests, which may or may not be detrimental to the Company or its activities, directly or indirectly lead to damages (except in the instances which are connected with the performance of his or her usual routine duties, or when it is done as required by law).

1.2. In the event of the Employee's dismissal for any reason, the Employee must immediately hand over to the Company all memoranda, tape-recordings, diskettes, films, photographs, layouts, brochures and notes in any form of record referring to any aspect of the Company's activities. The Employee must not retain copies of these documents since all such materials are considered exclusively as the Company's property.

1.3. In accordance with paragraph 139.2 of the Civil Code, the Employee must compensate the Company for all damages (including loss of profit) resulting from the non-fulfillment of his or her obligations which are stipulated in paragraph 6.

Answer the questions given in the following situation.

You work for Midland Bank, which has branches around the world. The department you are with deals with the stock exchange. Not long ago the bank bought $10 million worth of shares of ‘Standard Software', a company producing computers. You visited the ‘Standard Software's head office several times and made friends with Lucy Stark, a secretary of the company's chief executive officer R. Greenwood, who is considered to be the basic brainpower of the company.

This afternoon you phoned Lucy to invite her to go out tonight and she told you she could leave early because Mr Greenwood had fallen ill.

You meet Lucy at a café and she starts telling you that she's greatly worried about Mr Greenwood's health. After lunch today he asked Lucy to call an ambulance. When it arrived he complained of pains in his left shoulder and chest and was perspiring profusely. The ambulance took Mr Greenwood to hospital, but the employees were told it was not very serious. Lucy, however, knows Mr Greenwood's family has a history of heart trouble and that both his parents died of heart attacks.