Company Searching

[cessna l plate]

I am trying to get some information on a former manager of our company who has set up on his own. I want to ensure that he isn't in competition with us anymore, so this is my problem

I can find details about him on the net, but I cannot link that to a company name at all. I have found out that he is a director of 3 different companies, but I need to know the names of them, and I can't find a site that will do this for free, anyone know how to acheive this??

Thanks

[reuters77]

You can get this information from Companies House (www.companies-house.gov.uk) if he is a director of a UK company - their system should show all the UK companies of which he is a director.

There is a small fee payable for access to the information, but I'm not sure it is freely available anywhere.

[airborne_artist]

Buy a sub to 192.com - you can then search on the person by name and town of residence, and it will show all the companies of which he is a director. I'm not aware of any free service for this, though you used to be able to go to Cos Ho and look at the microfiche of individual companies for a small fee.

Does his employment contract specifically forbid him from any specific activities for a specified period after leaving the company? I've seen some pretty dodgy employment contracts over the years that do not/would not stand up in court. The phrase is restrictive covenant, and judges do not like them. They often throw them out wholesale. Far better to get the employee on taking/retaining proprietary information.

[cessna l plate]

Thanks for the relpies
As I understand it, in law a restictive covenant is part of an employment cotract, which is terminated when the employee leaves. You cannot enforce a terminated contract. In addition it is generally accepted by most lawyers that an employment cotract is never worth the paper it is written on anyway.

As far as I am aware he is not working in a competitor, but if he were to do so it would make an already uncomfortable existance even more so for our company. If this is the case I need to close the floodgates and get batting quickly, and therefore as his name has again appeared on radar I would like to see what he is doing now.

I don't want this individual to cause any more damage than he did when he was here!!!

[airborne_artist]

It's possible to write a restrictive covenant that has a life after the cessation of employment, but you would need to have legal opinion of the employment contract in force at the time the person left.

[cessna l plate]

As I said, most of the legal fraternity regard employment contracts in the same regard as an ash-tray on a motorbike !!!

Yes the covenants can be written to survive the actual contract, but we then get into a fully blown legal argument that is beyond those of us here (except Flying Lawyer perhaps) to establish if it can be enforced. In most cases it is better to just live with what your former employee is doing. Should the unthinkable happen my plan of attack is not to try and enforce a cotract, but to discredit the individual concerned quickly in order to protect my job. I therefore need to know what the little turd is up to. Simple really.

[IO540]

I know from from personal experience that a restrictive covenant can certainly exist after the person leaves. They are routinely used for that purpose; for example where a business owner sells a business (and the new owner doesn't want him to set up in competition) or where a key employee leaves and then the RC is used as a negotiating point (the more he agrees to not do, the more you give him as a golden handshake :) )

The RC has to meet various requirements if it is to stand up though and expensive specialist advice is needed. Employment law is an absolute nightmare and only those bang up to date are any good. I can't recall the details but e.g. there has to be a reasonable time limit, and you can't prevent somebody using their manual or intellectual skills to earn a living.

The best way to trap former employees is to prove that their new product was designed using tools developed in, or owned by, their former company - software tools are an obvious one (a bootleg copy of a C compiler, or even a windoze installation CD). That's why when you start your own business, having worked somewhere previously, you must purchase all new software tools, PC, printer, etc and keep the receipts. Even a text editor has to be purchased afresh (I remember purchasing a copy of Brief for £300 :) )

You can prevent the ex employee canvassing your former customers but this is much more difficult. It has to be done by proving he walked out with company confidential data. All he has to do is purchase a mailing list from some market research agency, which just happens to have all the right names on it, and he can mailshot the lot, and he's covered ;)

In reality nearly all programmers walk out with the sources of everything they have written while working for you - this is to be expected.