S
stolenfrom
Guest
This may be a bit complicated, I'll try to state the facts:
* My husband is owner of a company overseas that manufactures a product he developed and patented.
* In 1998, we hired someone in NC to open a US sales office. This employee was paid a very high salary and commission.
* Around the same time, our US subsidiary was incorporated in Delaware.
* We recently moved back to the US to run for our subsidiary.
* Three weeks ago, the employee resigned. The day before he resigned, his wife who did the book-keeping and who had authority to write checks wrote him a large check as commission. The check was wrong.
* We hired a NC lawyer to try to get that money back and to procecute criminally.
* The incident caused us to look over everything carefully.
* We've now found evidence that as far back as last July (it probably goes back further - we're still looking):
1) Our sales man was working with/for our EU distributor
2) Our EU distributor violated our agreement and patent
3) Together, they were working to open a
company that will compete with us
4) On our time, our employee who should be fulltime was contacting customers and suppliers.
5) Indications are he was working more for the other business than ours.
My guess is that the employee thought that once he stole so much money, we would have few resources to go after him.
Questions:
- Is there a way to go about this without going broke in the process?
- Can we sue the book-keeper (his wife who we also was on our payroll) for not telling us he was not working full time and for continuing to write him a full-time salary.
- Can we sue the employee in Small claims cort for not working full-time when he should have been and recover some $$ just for this to help pay legal costs.
- Where would we file, Delaware or NC?
- Can we recover $ because he was not looking for new sales for 3-6 months?
* My husband is owner of a company overseas that manufactures a product he developed and patented.
* In 1998, we hired someone in NC to open a US sales office. This employee was paid a very high salary and commission.
* Around the same time, our US subsidiary was incorporated in Delaware.
* We recently moved back to the US to run for our subsidiary.
* Three weeks ago, the employee resigned. The day before he resigned, his wife who did the book-keeping and who had authority to write checks wrote him a large check as commission. The check was wrong.
* We hired a NC lawyer to try to get that money back and to procecute criminally.
* The incident caused us to look over everything carefully.
* We've now found evidence that as far back as last July (it probably goes back further - we're still looking):
1) Our sales man was working with/for our EU distributor
2) Our EU distributor violated our agreement and patent
3) Together, they were working to open a
company that will compete with us
4) On our time, our employee who should be fulltime was contacting customers and suppliers.
5) Indications are he was working more for the other business than ours.
My guess is that the employee thought that once he stole so much money, we would have few resources to go after him.
Questions:
- Is there a way to go about this without going broke in the process?
- Can we sue the book-keeper (his wife who we also was on our payroll) for not telling us he was not working full time and for continuing to write him a full-time salary.
- Can we sue the employee in Small claims cort for not working full-time when he should have been and recover some $$ just for this to help pay legal costs.
- Where would we file, Delaware or NC?
- Can we recover $ because he was not looking for new sales for 3-6 months?