In a court filing this week, Holtec International’s ex-finance chief said he neither disclosed corporate secrets nor violated a nondisclosure agreement by publicly suing his former employer.
Kevin O’Rourke sued Holtec, Jupiter, Fla., June 1 in the Superior Court of New Jersey in Camden County, alleging the company overvalued itself in an effort to get an investment from Hyundai Engineering and Construction Co. of Seoul, South Korea.
The suit dropped about a month after Holtec, which in its reply to the suit painted O’Rourke as an “erratic and hostile” employee who sometimes refused to do his job, announced that it had signed “portentous agreements” for Hyundai to financially back the company’s planned fleet of small modular reactors. Months before that, Holtec publicized meetings in the U.S. with Hyundai.
“Defendants’ business relationship with the company identified in Plaintiff’s complaint was made public by Defendants prior to the filing of Plaintiff’s lawsuit, and therefore, was not ‘confidential’ as defined by Defendants’ own agreement,” O’Rourke wrote in a filing with the court, dated Monday.
O’Rourke also said that he “cannot be prohibited from disclosing illegal and fraudulent conduct” by his confidentiality agreement with Holtec, which the company last week provided to the court.
O’Rourke seeks a jury trial and unspecified financial damages. Holtec, in a counterclaim, seeks attorneys fees and unspecified damages. The court had not scheduled hearings or a trial as of Wednesday, though O’Rourke, in his filing this week, demanded that Holtec file a written statement of its damages with the court within a week.
Among the assets O’Rourke accused Holtec of overvaluing is the interim storage site for spent nuclear fuel that the company has proposed to build in southeastern New Mexico.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has licensed the site, but federal judges this month ruled that licenses of that type are illegal. New Mexico has also outlawed storage of spent nuclear fuel in its territory. No one had challenged the state law in federal court, as of Wednesday.
