BlackBerry Ltd. filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Sebastien Marineau-Mes, who wanted to resign from his post to join Apple Inc. The court judgment issued on Tuesday ordered him to stay at the company until June.
Marineau-Mes, BlackBerry's senior vice president for software, tendered his resignation in December 2013 and was set to accept the position of vice president of Core OS Apple has offered him. However, the contract he signed after being promoted as the executive vice president for platform development in October, 2013, stated that he cannot leave the company immediately and must stay until after six months from the submission of his resignation.
He then argued that since his promotion took place when the company was experiencing chaos and promotions were frozen, the contract is invalid. He added that when John Chen, the new BlackBerry CEO took over in November, his role as an EVP changed. He was even put on "vacation pay" and has not worked for the company since the start of January.
Internal e-mails attested otherwise. They showed that he had been promoted, though it was not publicized due to promotion freeze in the company.
In a statement to The Guardian, BlackBerry said "[It] will not stand by while a former employee violates his employment contract. It is unfortunate that we had to take this step, but we will do whatever is necessary to ensure that employees honor the agreements they make with us. When we enter into an agreement with an employee, as we have with Mr. Marineau, we expect him to honor his commitment just as we would expect that we will honor ours."
The company was very happy that the court ruling for the case filed in Ontario favored them.
Apple declined to comment when asked about the issue.
