Pulaski Bank has filed a lawsuit against three former employees over mortgage data that the Creve Couer, Mo., bank claims the employees took and are using to give their new employer a leg up.
The $1.3 billion-asset bank unit of Pulaski Financial filed its lawsuit Tuesday against Rita Rieke, Linda Stewart and Charles Ziegler in U.S. District Court of Kansas. The lawsuit also names First State Bank of St. Charles, Missouri, where Pulaski believes all three are now employed.
Pulaski is seeking an injunction that would bar the former employees and First State from using the information, make them return the data to Pulaski, force them to delete the files from their computer and compel them to allow a computer forensic expert to verify the deletion. Pulaski is also seeking actual and punitive damages.
In the complaint, Pulaski says that Rieke, as a sales manager, was consistently one of its top performers until last month when she only brought in four applications. "Upon information and belief, Rieke's dramatic drop in performance was the result of her redirection of applications and business from Pulaski to First State Bank."
She was terminated June 21.
The lawsuit claims that Rieke had been planning earlier in the year to move a large team to First State Bank. Its evidence includes a handwritten thank you note to Rieke from another employee thanking her for including her in the planned move.
The lawsuit also claims that Ziegler, a loan officer, e-mailed a large file to a non-company account last month before leaving Pulaski. Stewart, a closing supervisor, allegedly transferred documents onto a portable electronic storage device after resigning.
"Having these relationships with Pulaski's customers and having knowledge of Pulaski's trade secrets, including but not limited to customer-specific interest rate and fee information, has placed the defendants in a position in which they can unfairly compete with Pulaski and divert significant loan and account business from Pulaski by offering marginally better terms," the complaint reads.
The mortgage business is an important one to Pulaski. In the first quarter, the company had $1.9 million in mortgage revenues, making up 52% of its noninterest income.
First State Bank said in a filing Monday that nothing was downloaded to Stewart's portable disk drive and that she is willing to give it to Pulaski. The filing also said that the spreadsheet Ziegler downloaded was the same one he brought to Pulaski when he joined in 2007. He planned to send out a mailer to customers to announce his move to First State Bank.
"FSB understands that Pulaski Bank never told Mr. Ziegler that the list did not belong to him, that he should destroy it, or that he could not continue to use it as his own," according to the memorandum, which was filed to oppose Pulaski's request for a temporary restraining order.
