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(Alliance News) - PCI-PAL PLC on Wednesday said it was "shocked" and "surprised" after a competitor's US lawyers announced that confidentiality agreements reached during ongoing litigation were breached over a year ago.
PCI-PAL said it is considering further legal action.
The Suffolk, England-based software-as-a-service provider of secure cloud payment solutions said that on May 26, US lawyers for PCI-PAL's competitor Sycurio Ltd informed it that in April last year, Sycurio had breached the terms of certain confidentiality agreements.
The agreements were made during ongoing patent litigation in the UK. Sycurio, a Surrey, England-headquartered payment software provider formerly named Semafone Ltd, alleges infringement by PCI-PAL of its US patents. The company, which said Sycurio's claims are "unfounded", lost a motion to dismiss in June last year, having claimed that said patents were "too abstract to be patentable".
As part of the litigation process, the company said it had satisfied requirements to provide explanations of how patented technology was implemented across its customer base, and how its systems are configured. According to PCI-PAL, Sycurio's lawyers confirmed that it had illegitimately shared this information with personnel not covered by the confidentiality agreements.
Sycurio also acknowledged that PCI-PAL's confidential information "may" have been used in a board meeting during which multiple internal and external personnel were present. These included senior product staff and personnel from Livingbridge LLP, private equity owners of Sycurio.
PCI-PAL said it is consulting with lawyers to ascertain the full extent of the breach and how to deal with the legal implications. The company believes that this will require further disclosures from Sycurio, and said further legal action against it or other recipients of the confidential information may prove necessary.
"The PCI-PAL board is shocked that Sycurio, who are themselves a provider of data security solutions, should have such weak controls that a data breach such as this could have happened," the company said on Wednesday.
"Furthermore, the PCI-PAL board is surprised at the time it has taken for it to be discovered and reported. It has taken Sycurio over a year to inform PCI-PAL of the breach, therefore the full extent of how this confidential information has been used by Sycurio since April 2022 is not yet known."
Shares in PCI-PAL were up 2.1% at 57.68 pence in London on Wednesday morning.
By Emma Curzon, Alliance News reporter
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