By Dan McCue

CHARLESTON -- Armored-vehicle manufacturer Force Protection Inc. is suing competitor Protected Vehicles Inc., charging the latter with stealing its trade secrets.

The 29-page lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Charleston on Tuesday, asserts that Garth Barrett and other former Force Protection executives who left the Ladson-based company two years ago to found Protected Vehicles left with more than their contributions to their 401(k) plans. The lawsuit claims they misappropriated confidential and proprietary information.

According to the lawsuit, the misappropriated information includes design details related to Force Protection’s ballistic- and blast-protected vehicles, as well as lists of suppliers for the raw materials that go into the armored, mine-resistant vehicles.

In court papers, Force Protection’s attorneys, Anne Louise Ross and John H. Tiller of the Charleston law firm Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd P.A., said Barrett—a founder of Force Protection and also, at various times, its president, chief technology officer and facility security officer—“had unlimited access to the trade secrets and confidential information belonging to Force Protection relating to all aspects of (its) various armored vehicle products, including research, design, development, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and testing.”

Force Protection charges that Protected Vehicles relied on that information to “unfairly compete with the armored vehicles produced by Force Protection, in particular, the Buffalo, Cougar, and the Cheetah.”

Barrett’s co-defendants in the civil suit are Thomas Thebes, Force Protection’s former vice president of finance, and Paul Palmer, the company’s former production planner.

In all, the North Charleston-based PVI, which earlier this week announced it was laying off more than 230 workers, must answer to 11 counts. The defendants stand accused of computer fraud, copyright infringement, violating the South Carolina Trade Secrets Act, torturous interference with contractual relations, unfair trade practices, breach of contract and civil conspiracy, among other charges.

Force Protection is seeking injunctive relief, return of computer hard drives and other storage media it believes were taken from its facility by the defendants, damages and recovery of its court costs and attorneys’ fees.

According to the lawsuit, while employed by Force Protection, Barrett used an external hard drive to create a copy of the hard drive from his Force Protection computer that contained trade secrets and confidential information, and took it home.

The suit charges that he refused to surrender this external hard drive when Force Protection learned about it and issued a written demand that he do so.