One of the architects of a scheme to defraud more than $150 million from San Diego-based tech giant Qualcomm pleaded guilty in federal court on Thursday.
Sanjiv Taneja, a Northern California resident, served as the CEO of a startup that was sold to Qualcomm to acquire a technology that it technically owned already. Taneja pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering related to a $1.5 million transaction involving proceeds from the fraudulent deal.
Last year, a federal grand jury indicted four people, including Taneja, and San Diego residents Karim Arabi and Ali Akbar Shokouhi.
Arabi, 57, previously served as Qualcomm’s vice president of research and development and came up with a faster method for evaluating micro-processors during the “design for test” process while working at the company. Under of Arabi’s employment agreement, intellectual property created while he was on Qualcomm’s payroll belonged to the company.
Ex-Qualcomm research vice president and three others charged in $150 million fraud schemeIn a plea agreement, Taneja, 60, itted that he and his co-defendants carried out a ruse to hide Arabi’s involvement in the 8-month-old startup. Arabi was a Qualcomm employee while the deal was being negotiated and through its sale in October 2015.
By concealing his involvement, the startup’s leaders could claim the company was an “angel-funded” outside firm. Arabi left Qualcomm in June 2016 after working there on and off for nine years.
The San Diego company paid about $180 million for the startup, with $150 million in upfront cash according to court documents.
That technology Arabi developed was marketed to Qualcomm as the brainchild of a Canadian graduate student for a new Bay Area startup.
The graduate student happened to be Arabi’s younger sister. She was studying subjects generally related to inkjet printing, not semiconductor design, according to the indictment. She legally changed her name during the process, and while she’s listed as the inventor on provisional patents, the applications were filed by Arabi using sham email s to conceal his identity, according to prosecutors.
Taneja acknowledged that he never met the person who was said to be the creator of the technology and to his knowledge, Arabi’s sister wasn’t involved in the firm’s technical or strategic decisions.
He also itted that he asked Arabi for Qualcomm’s performance metrics for its existing technology, to help boost their marketing pitch. In the process, Taneja said he called Arabi by a different name over text messages to hide his association with the startup.
In the plea agreement, Taneja also revealed that Arabi directed him to delete emails about the scheme once Qualcomm started investigating the acquisition deal, however, Taneja was later able to recover those emails.
“Fraud and deceit undermine legitimate businesses and the marketplace, whether they victimize small businesses or multinational corporations and their shareholders,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Andrew R. Haden. “This office will seek justice against wrongdoers, big and small alike.”
